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, A HI SKIN ANTHOLOGY 

\ 



COMPILED 1SY 

WM. SLOANE KENNEDY 


NEW YORK: 

JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER. 


The Alden Rook Co., Chicago. 






HN > 5 ?? 

cspf 4 


Copyright, 1886, 

BY 

JOHN B. ALDEN. 


0 O N T E N T S 


Chapter I. 

Economic Canons, ------- 181 

Wealth, - -.- 189 

Labor, -------- 191 

Riches, --------- 194 

Poverty, - 214 

On Co-Operation, ....... 225 

Trade, --------- 22G 

Land, ......... 238 

Machinery, ........ 213 

War,.244 

Modern Warfare, ....... 248 

A Dream-Parable of War and Wealth, .... 250 

Government, ....... 258 

Liberty, ......... 262 

Fresh Air and Light, ...... 264 

Chapter II. 

Education, ........ 209 

The Education of Children, ..... 287 

Teaching Science to Children, ..... 295 

Education in Art, ....... 298 

Chapter III. 

« 

Museums, .309 

Chapter IV. 

St. George’s Guild, ------- 314 

In Ruskin’s Utopia, ------- 319 












By t.ra» after 


' 23 me 




A liUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


PART II.—SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 


CHAPTER I. 

Economic Canons. 

Political Economy is not itself a science, but a 
system of conduct founded on the sciences, and 
impossible, except under certain conditions of moral 
culture. Which is only to say, that industry, 
frugality, and discretion, the three foundations of 
economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be at¬ 
tained without moral discipline: a flat truism, the 
reader may think, thus stated, yet a truism which 
is denied both vociferously, and in all endeavor, by 
the entire populace of Europe ; who are at present 
hopeful of obtaining wealth by tricks of trade, with¬ 
out industry. 

The study which lately in England has been called 
Political Economy is in reality nothing more than 
the investigation of some accidental phenomena of 
modern commercial operations, nor has it been 
true in its investigation even of these .—Munera 
Fulveris, p, 11, 19. 

Among the delusions which at different periods 
have possessed themselves of the minds of large 
masses of the human race, perhaps the most curious 
—certainly the least creditable—is the modern* soi- 
disant science of political economy, based on the 
idea that an advantageous code of social action may 
be determined irrespectively of the influence of 
social affection. 

Observe, I neither impugn nor doubt the conclu- 

(181) 




182 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


sions of the science, if its terms are accepted. I am 
simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those 
of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men 
had no skeletons. It might be shown, on that 
supposition, that it would be advantageous to roll 
the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, 
or stretch them into cables; and that when these 
results were effected, the re-insertion of the skeleton 
would be attended with various inconveniences to 
their constitution. The reasoning might be admir¬ 
able, the conclusions true, and the science deficient 
only in applicability. Modern political economy 
stands on a precisely similar basis. Assuming, not 
that the human being has no skeleton, but that it 
is all skeleton, it founds an ossifiant theory of pro¬ 
gress on this negation of a soul; and having shown 
the utmost that may be made of bones, and con¬ 
structed a number of interesting geometrical figures 
with death’s-heads and humeri, successfully proves 
the inconvenience of the reappearance of a soul 
among these corpuscular structures. I do not deny 
the truth of this theory : I simply deny its applica¬ 
bility to the present phase of the world .—Urito This 
Last , p. 14. 

The real science of political economy, which has 
yet to be distinguished from the bastard science, as 
medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from as¬ 
trology, is that which teaches nations to desire and 
labor for the things that lead to life; and which 
teaches them to scorn and destroy the things that 
lead to destruction .—Unto This Last, p. 66. 

Political economy (the economy of a State, or of 
citizens) consists simply in the production, preserva¬ 
tion, and distribution, at fittest time and place, of 
useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts 
his.hay at the right time; the shipwright who 
drives his bolts well home in sound wood; the 
builder who lays good bricks in well-tempered mor¬ 
tar ; the housewife who takes care of her furniture 
in the parlor, and guards against all waste in her 
kitchen ; and the singer who rightly disciplines, and 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 


183 


never overstrains her voice : are all political econo¬ 
mists in the true and final sense; adding continu¬ 
ally to the riches and well-being of the nation to 
which they belong. 

But mercantile economy, the economy of “merces” 
or of “pay,” signifies the accumulation, in the 
hands of individuals, of legal or moral claim upon, 
or power over, the labor of others; every such 
claim implying precisely as much poverty or debt 
on one side, as it implies riches or right on the other. 
It does not, therefore, necessarily involve an addi¬ 
tion to the actual property, or well-being, of the 
State in which it exists.— Unto This Last , p. 32. 

The Production of Good Men and Women 
the object of True Economy.— This is the ob¬ 
ject of all true policy and true economy : “ utmost 
multitude of good men on every given space of 
ground ”—imperatively always, good, sound, honest 
men, not a mob of white-faced thieves.— Athena, 
p. 91. 

A little group of wise hearts is better than a wil¬ 
derness full of fools.— Crown of Wild Olive, Lect. 
III., p. 82. 

It is strange that men always praise enthusiasti¬ 
cally any person who, by a momentary exertion, 
saves a life; but praise very hesitatingly a person 
who, by exertion and self-denial prolonged through 
years, creates one. We give the crown “ ob civem 
servatum ; ”—why not “ ob civem natum ? ” Born, 
I mean, to the full, in soul as well as body. Eng¬ 
land has oak enough, I think, for both chajfiets.— 
Unto This Last, p. 77. 

The Function of Labor in National Life.— 
It is physically impossible that true religious knowl¬ 
edge, or pure morality, should exist among any 
classes of a nation who do not work with their 
hands for their bread.— Fors, III., p. 249. 

A Money-Making Mob.— A nation cannot last as 
a money-making mob : it cann >t with impunity,— 
it cannot with existence;—go on despising literature, 


184 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


despising science, despising art, despising nature, 
despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on 
Pence.— Sesame and Lilies , p.54. 

Vitality and Decay, in Nations.— The customs 
and manners of a sensitive and highly-trained 
race are always Vital: that is to say, they are or¬ 
derly manifestations of intense life, like the habitual 
action of the fingers of a musician. The customs 
and manners of a vile and rude race, on the con¬ 
trary, are conditions of decay: they are not, prop¬ 
erly speaking, habits, but incrustations; not re¬ 
straints, or forms of life; but gangrenes, noisome, 
and the beginnings of death.— Munera Pulveris , 
p. 90. 

“An Honest Man is the Noblest Work of 
God.”—I have sometimes heard Pope condemned for 
the lowness, instead of the height of his standard :— 
“ Honesty is indeed a respectable virtue ; but how 
much higher may men attain ! Shall nothing more 
be asked of us than that we be honest ? ” 

For the present, good friends, nothing. It seems 
that in our aspirations to be more than that, we 
have to some extent lost sight of the propriety of be¬ 
ing so much as that.— Unto This Last , p. 7. 

Whenever in my writings on Political Economy, I 
assume that a little honesty or generosity,—or what 
used to be called “ virtue ”—may be calculated up¬ 
on as a human motive of action, people always 
answer me, saying, “You must not calculate on 
that: that is not in human nature: you must not 
assume anything to be common to men but acquisi¬ 
tiveness and jealousy; no other feeling ever has 
influence on them, except accidentally, and in mat¬ 
ters out of the way of business.”— Sesame and 
Lilies , p. 30. 

Fight—will you?—and pull other people’s houses 
down ; while I am to be set to build your barracks, 
that you may go smoking and spitting about all 
day, with a cock’s comb on your head, and spurs to 
your heels?—(I observe, by the way, the Italian 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 


18 o 

soldiers have now got cocks’ tails on their heads, 
instead of cocks’ combs.)—Lay down the law to me 
in a wig,—will you ? and tell me the house I have 
built is —not mine? and take my dinner from 
me, as a fee for that opinion? Build, my man,— 
build, or dig,—one of the two ; and then eat your 
honestly earned meat, thankfully, and let other 
people alone, if you can’t help them.— Fors, II., 
p. 300. 

Definition of Currency.— The currency of any 
country consists of every document acknowledging 
debt, which is transferable in the country .—Munera 
Pulveris, p. 59. 

Inflation of C urrency.— The Government may 
at any time, with perfect justice, double its issue of 
coinage, if it gives every man who had ten pounds 
in his pocket, another ten pounds, and every man 
who had ten pence, another ten pence ; for it thus 
does not make any of them richer; it merely di¬ 
vides their counters for them into twice the number. 
But if it gives the newly-issued coins to other people, 
or keeps them itself, it simply robs the former hold¬ 
ers to precisely that extent.— Athena , p. 92. 

If ten men are cast away on a rock, with a thou¬ 
sand pounds in their pockets, and there is on the 
rock neither food nor shelter, their money is worth 
simply nothing; for nothing is to be had for it: if 
they build ten huts, and recover a cask of biscuit 
from the wreck, then their thousand pounds,-at its 
maximum value, is worth ten huts and a cask of 
biscuit. If they make their thousand pounds into 
two thousand by writing new notes, their two thou¬ 
sand pounds are still only worth ten huts and a 
cask of biscuit.— Athena , p. 91. 

The lowered value of money is often (and this is a 
very curious case of economical back current) indi¬ 
cated, not so much by a rise in the price of goods, as 
by a fall in that of labor. The household lives as 
comfortably as it did on a hundred a year, but the 
master has to work half as hard again to get it. 
This increase of toil is to an active nation often a 


186 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


kind of play; men go into it as into a violent game ; 
fathers of families die quicker, and the gates of or¬ 
phan asylums are choked with applicants ; distress 
and crime spread and fester through a thousand 
silent channels ; but there is no commercial or ele¬ 
mentary convulsion ; no chasm opens into the abyss 
through the London clay ; no gilded victim is asked 
of the Guards: the Stock-Exchange falls into no 
hysterics ; and the old lady of Threadneedle Street 
does not so much as ask for “My fan, Peter.”— 
Arrows of the Chace, II., p. 45. 

Gold Coin. —Every bit of gold found in Australia, 
so long as it remains uncoined, is an article offered 
for sale like any other ; but as soon as it is coined 
into pounds, it diminishes the value of every pound 
we have now in our pockets. 

The waste of labor in obtaining the gold, though 
it cannot be estimated by help of any existing data, 
may be understood in its bearing on entire economy 
by supposing it limited to transactions between two 
persons. If two farmers in Australia have been ex¬ 
changing corn and cattle with each other for years, 
keeping their accounts of reciprocal debt in any 
simple way, the sum of the possessions of either 
would not be diminished, though the part of it 
which was lent or borrowed were only reckoned by 
marks on a stone, or notches on a tree; and the 
one counted himself accordingly, so many scratches, 
or so many notches, better than the other. But it 
would soon be seriously diminished if, discovering 
gold in their fields, each resolved only to accept 
golden counters for a reckoning ; and accordingly, 
whenever he wanted a sack of corn or a cow, was 
obliged to go and wash sand for a week before he 
could get the means of giving a receipt for them.— 
Munera Pulveris , pp. 60, 62. 

The Nature of Intrinsic Value. —Intrinsic 
value is the absolute power of anything to support 
life. A sheaf of wheat of given quality and weight 
has in it a measurable power of sustaining the sub¬ 
stance of the body ; a cubic foot of pure air a fixed 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. 


187 


power of sustaining its warmth; and a cluster of 
flowers of given beauty a fixed power of enlivening 
or animating the senses and heart.— Munera Pul- 
veris, p. 24. 

The economist, in saying that his science takes no 
account of the qualities of pictures, merely signifies 
that he cannot conceive of any quality of essential 
badness or goodness existing in pictures ; and that 
he is incapable of investigating the laws of wealth 
in such articles. Which is the fact. But, being in¬ 
capable of defining intrinsic value in pictures, it 
follows that he must be equally helpless to define 
the nature of intrinsic value in painted glass, or in 
painted pottery, or in patterned stuffs, or in any 
other national produce requiring true human in¬ 
genuity. Nay, though capable of conceiving the 
idea of intrinsic value with respect to beasts of bur¬ 
den, no economist lias endeavored to state the gen¬ 
eral principles of National Economy, even with 
regard to the horse or the ass. And, in fine, the 
modern political economists have been, without ex¬ 
ception, incapable of apprehending the nature of 
intrinsic value at all. 

When, in the winter of 1851, I was collecting ma¬ 
terials for my work on Venetian architecture, three 
of the pictures of Tintoret on the roof of the School 
of St. Roch were hanging down in ragged fragments, 
mixed with lath and plaster, round the apertures 
made by the fall of three Austrian heavy shot. The 
city of Venice was not, it appeared, rich enough to 
repair the damage that winter; and buckets were 
set on the floor of the upper room of the school to 
catch the rain, which not only fell directly through 
the shot holes, but found its way, owing to the gen¬ 
erally pervious state of the roof, through many of 
the canvases of Tintoret’s in other parts of the 
ceiling. 

It was a lesson to me, as I have just said, no less 
direct than severe ; for I knew already at that time 
(though I have not ventured to assert, until recently 
at Oxford,) that the pictures of Tintoret in Venice 
were accurately the most precious articles of wealth 


188 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


in Europe, being the best existing productions of 
human industry. Now at the time that three of 
them were thus fluttering in moist rags from the 
roof they had adorned, the shops of the Rue Rivoli 
at Paris were, in obedience to a steadily-increasing 
public Demand, beginning to Show a steadily-in¬ 
creasing Supply of elaborately-finished and colored 
lithographs, representing the modern dances of de¬ 
light, among which the cancan has since taken a 
distinguished place. 

The labor employed on the stone of one of these 
lithographs is very much more than Tintoret was in 
the habit of giving to a picture of average size. 
Considering labor as the origin of value, therefore, 
the stone so highly wrought would be of greater 
value than the picture ; and since also it is capable 
of producing a large number of immediately salea¬ 
ble or exchangeable impressions, for which the 
“demand” is constant, the city of Paris naturally 
supposed itself, and on all hitherto believed or 
stated principles of political economy, was, infi¬ 
nitely richer in the possession of a large number of 
these lithographic stones, (not to speak of countless 
oil pictures and marble carvings of similar char¬ 
acter), than Venice in the possession of those rags of 
mildewed canvas, flaunting in the south wind and 
its salt rain. And, accordingly, Paris provided 
(without thought of the expense) lofty arcades of 
shops, and rich recesses of innumerable private 
apartments, for the protection of these better treas¬ 
ures of hers from the weather. 

Yet, all the while, Paris was not the richer for 
these possessions. Intrinsically, the delightful lith¬ 
ographs were not wealth, but polar contraries of 
wealth. She was, by the exact quantity of labor 
she had given to produce these, sunk below, instead 
of above, absolute Poverty. They not only were 
false Riches—they were true Debt, which had to be 
paid at last—and the present aspect of the Rue 
Rivoli shows in what manner. 

And the faded stains of the Venetian ceiling, all 
the while, were absolute and inestimable wealth. 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 180 

Useless to their possessors as forgotten treasure in 
a buried city, they had in them, nevertheless, the 
intrinsic and eternal nature of wealth; and Venice, 
still possessing the ruins of them, was a rich city; 
only, the Venetians had not a notion sufficiently 
correct even for the very common purpose of in¬ 
ducing them to put slates on a roof, of what was 
“meant by wealth .”—Munera Pulveris, pp. 6-8. 


WEALTPI. 

Wealth is the possession of the valuable by 
the valiant. —Unto This Last, p. 60 » 

The study of Wealth is a province of natural 
science:—it deals with the essential properties of 
things. 

The study of Money is a province of commercial 
scienceit deals with conditions of engagement 
and exchange. 

The study of Riches is a province of moral sci¬ 
ence:—it deals with the due relations of men to 
each other in regard of material possessions: and 
with the just laws of their association for purposes 
of labor .—Munera Pulveris, p. 24. 

One mass of money is the outcome of action which 
has created,—another, of action which has annihi¬ 
lated,—ten times as much in the gathering of it; 
such and such strong hands have been paralyzed, 
as if they had been numbed by nightshade; so 
many strong men’s courage broken, so many pro¬ 
ductive operations hindered; this and the other 
false direction given to labor, and lying image of 
prosperity set up, on Dura plains dug into seven- 
times-heated furnaces. That which seems to be 
wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of 
far-reaching ruin; a wrecker’s handful of coin 
gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled 
an argosy; a camp-follower’s bundle of rags un¬ 
wrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers dead; 
the purchase-pieces of potter’s fields, wherein shall 



190 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


be buried together the citizen aiid the stranger.— 
TJnto This Last , p. 39. 

There is no Wealth but Life.— Life, including 
all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. 
That country is the richest which nourishes the 
greatest number of noble and happy human be¬ 
ings; that man is richest who, having perfected the 
functions of his own life to the utmost, has also 
the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by 
means of his possessions, over the lives of others.— 
Unto This Last, p. 83. 

The True Veins of Wealth. —Since the essence 
of wealth consists in power over men, will it not 
follow that the nobler and the more in number the 
persons are over whom it has power, the greater 
the wealth ? Perhaps it may even appear after 
some consideration, that the persons themselves 
are the wealth—that these pieces of gold with which 
we are in the habit of guiding them, are, in fact, 
nothing more than a kind of Byzantine harness or 
trappings, very glittering and beautiful in barbaric 
sight, wherewith we bridle the creatures; but that 
if these same living creatures could be guided with¬ 
out the fretting and jingling of the Byzants in their 
mouths and ears, they might themselves be more 
valuable than their bridles. In fact, it may be dis¬ 
covered that the true veins of wealth are purple— 
and not in Rock, but in Flesh—perhaps even that 
the final outcome and consummation of all wealth 
is in the producing as many as possible full- 
breatlied, bright-eyed, and happy-liearted human 
creatures .—Unto This Last, p. 41. 

Wealth as Power. —Since the essence of wealth 
consists in its authority over men, if the apparent 
or nominal wealth fail in this power, it fails in es¬ 
sence; in fact, ceases to be wealth at all. It does 
not appear lately in England, that our authority 
over men is absolute. The servants show some dis¬ 
position to rush riotously upstairs, under an im¬ 
pression that their wages are not regularly paid. 
We should augur ill of any gentleman’s property 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 191 


to whom this happened every other day in his 
drawing-room* 

So also, the power of our wealth seems limited as 
respects the comfort of the servants, no less than 
their quietude. The persons in the kitchen appear 
to be ill-dressed, squalid, half-starved. One cannot 
help imagining that the riches of the establishment 
must be of a very theoretical and documentary 
character .—TJnto This Last , p. 4i. 


LABOR. 

The beginning of all good law, and nearly thd 
end of it, is in these two ordinances,—That every 
man shall do good work for his bread; and sec¬ 
ondly, That every man shall have good bread for 
his Work.— Fors, I., p. 141. 

To succeed to my own satisfaction in a manual 
piece of work, is life,—to me, as to all men; and it 
is only the peace which comes necessarily from 
manual iabor which in all time has kept the hon¬ 
est country people patient in their task of main¬ 
taining the rascals who live in towns.— Fors , II,$ 
p. 306. 

Labor is the cdntest of the life of man with an 
opposite. Literally, it is the quantity of “ Lapse,” 
loss, or failure of human life, caused by any effort; 
It is usually confused with effort itself, or the appli¬ 
cation of power (opera); but there is much effort 
which is merely a mode of recreation, or of pleas¬ 
ure. The most beautiful actions of the human 
body, and the highest results of the human intelli¬ 
gence, are conditions, or achievements, of quite un- 
laborious,—nay, of recreative,—effort. But labor 
is the suffering in effort, it is the negative quan¬ 
tity, or quantity of de-feat, which has to be counted 
against every Feat, and of de-fect which has to be 
counted against every Fact, or Deed of men. In 
brief, it is “ that quantity of our toil which we die 
in .”—Munera Pulveris, p. 49. 



192 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


There is one fixed idea in the mind of every Euro¬ 
pean progressive politician, at this time; namely, 
that by a certain application of Financial Art, and 
by the erection of a certain quantity of new build¬ 
ings on a colossal scale, it will be possible for soci¬ 
ety hereafter to pass its entire life in eating, smok¬ 
ing, harlotry, and talk; without doing anything 
whatever with its hands Or feet of a laborious char¬ 
acter.— Fors, II., p. 286. 

A happy nation may be defined as one in which 
the husband’s hand is on the plough, and the house¬ 
wife’s on the needle; so in due time reaping its 
golden harvest, and shining in golden vesture: 
■and an unhappy nation is one which, acknowledg¬ 
ing no use of plough nor needle, will assuredly at 
last find its storehouse empty in the famine, and its 
breast naked to the cold .—The Two Paths, p. 121; 

Good Work ill-paid or not paid at all.— 
Generally, good, useful work, whether of the hand 
or head, is either ill-paid, dr not paid at all. I 
don’t say it should, be so, but it always is so. Peo¬ 
ple, as a rule, Only pay for being amused or being 
cheated, not for being served. Five thousand a 
year to your talker, and a shilling a day to your 
fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of 
the best head work in art, literature, or Science, is 
ever x^aid for. How much do you think Homer got 
for his Iliad ? or Dante for his Paradise ? only bitter 
bread and salt, and going up and down other x^eo- 
ple’s stairs .—Grown of Wild Olit>e, Lect. II., p. 85. 

Wages not always determined ry Competi¬ 
tion.— I pay my servants exactly what wages I 
think necessary to make them comfortable. The 
sum is not determined at all by competition; but 
sometimes by my notions of their comfort and de¬ 
serving, and sometimes by theirs. If I were to be¬ 
come x>enniless to-morrow, several of them would 
certainly still serve me for nothing. 

In both the real and supposed cases the so-called 
“law ” of vulgar x)olitical economy is absolutely set 
at defiance. Hut I cannot set the law of gravita- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 193 


tion at defiance, nor determine that in my house I 
will not allow ice to melt, when the temx>erature is 
above thirty-two degrees. A true law outside of 
my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It is 
not, therefore, a law of Nature that wages are de¬ 
termined by competition .—Munera Pulveris, p. 10. 

Employments. —There being three great classes of 
mechanical powers at our disposal, namely (a) vital 
or muscular power; (&) natural mechanical power 
of wind, water, and electricity; and (c) artificially 
produced mechanical power, it is the first princi¬ 
ple of economy to use all available vital power 
first, then the inexpensive natural forces, and only 
at last to have recourse to artificial power. And 
this, because it is always better for a man to work 
with his own hands to feed and clothe himself, than 
to stand idle while a machine works for him; and 
if he cannot, by all the labor healthily possible to 
him, feed and clothe himself, then it is better to use 
an inexpensive machine—as a windmill or water¬ 
mill—than a costly one like a steam-engine, so long 
as we have natural force enough at our disposal. 

. . . The principal point of all to be kept in view 
is, that in every idle arm and shoulder throughout 
the country there is a certain quantity of force, 
equivalent to the force of so much fuel; and that 
it is mere insane waste to dig for coal for our force, 
while the vital force is unused; and not only un¬ 
used, but, in being so, corrupting and polluting 
itself. We waste our coal, and spoil our humanity 
at one and the same instant. . . . Then, in employ¬ 
ing all the muscular power at our disposal we are 
to make the employments we choose as educational 
as possible. For a wholesome human employment 
is the first and best method of education, mental as 
well as bodily. 

The next great principle of employment is, that 
whenever there is pressure of poverty to be met, all 
enforced occupation should be directed to the pro¬ 
duction of useful articles only, that is to say, of 
food, of simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means 


194 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY . 


of conveying, distributing, and preserving these. 
. . . Men cannot live on ribands, or buttons, or 
velvets, or by going quickly from place to place; 
and every coin spent in useless ornament, or use¬ 
less motion, is so much withdrawn from the na¬ 
tional means of life. One of the most beautiful 
uses of railroads is to enable A to travel from the 
town of X to take away the business of B in the 
town of Y; while, in the meantime, B travels from 
the town of Y to take away A’s business in the town 
of X. But the national wealth is not increased by 
these operations. . . . 

And lastly: Since for every idle person, some one 
else must be working somewhere to provide him 
with clothes and food, and doing, therefore, double 
the quantity of work that would be enough for his 
own needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to 
compel the idle person to work for his maintenance 
himself.— Attyeria, pp. 96-99. 


RICHES. 

The first of all English games is making money. 
That is an all-absorbing game; and we knock each 
other down oftener in playing at that than at foot¬ 
ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is abso¬ 
lutely without purpose; no one who engages heart¬ 
ily in that game ever knows why .—Crown of Wild 
Olive , Lect. I., p. 21. 

And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the road¬ 
side suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, 
as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and 
crags have just the same result on rags .—Crown of 
Wild Olive, Lect. I., p. 29. 

The guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of 
all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists—that is to 
say, people who live by percentages on the labor of 
others; instead of by fair wages for their own.— 
Fors, I., p. 97. 

For, during the last eight hundred years, the up¬ 
per classes of Europe have been one large Picnic 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 195 

Party. Most of them have been religions also; and 
in sitting down, by companies, upon the green 
grass, in parks, gardens, and the like, have con¬ 
sidered themselves commanded into that position 
by Divine authority, and fed with bread from 
Heaven : of which they duly considered it proper 
to bestow the fragments in support, and the tithes 
in tuition, of the poor.— Fors, I., p. 25. 

There will be always a number of men. who would 
fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth 
as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily, that 
class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in in¬ 
tellect, and more or less cowardly. It is physically 
impossible for a well-educated, intellectual, or 
brave man to make money the chief object of his 
thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him 
to make his dinner the principal object of them.— 
Crown of Wild Olive , Lect. I., p. 26. 

There is a working class—strong and happy— 
among both rich and poor; there is an idle class— 
weak, wicked, and miserable—among both rich and 
poor. And the worst of the misunderstandings 
arising between the two orders come of the unlucky 
fact that the wise of one class habitually contem¬ 
plate the foolish of the other .—Crown of Wild Olive , 
Lect. I., p. 19. 

Lowly Pleasures. —What is chiefly needed in 
England at the present day is to show the quan¬ 
tity of pleasure that may be obtained by a con¬ 
sistent, well-administered competence, modest, con¬ 
fessed, and laborious. We need examples of people 
who, leaving Heaven to decide whether they are to 
rise in the world, decide for themselves that they 
will be happy in it, and have resolved to seek—not 
greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher 
fortune, but deeper felicity; making the first of 
possessions, self-possession; and honoring them¬ 
selves in the harmless pride and calm pursuits of 
peace .—TJnto This Last , p. 89. 

Money is a strange kind of seed; scattered, it is 
poison; but set, it is bread: so that a man whom 


196 


A HU SKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


God has appointed to be a sower must bear as 
lightly as he may the burden of gold and of j>os- 
sessions, till he find the proper places to sow them 
in.— Fors, III., p. 124. 

Inequalities of Wealth. —As diseased local de¬ 
termination of the blood involves depression of 
the general health of the system, all morbid local 
action of riches will be found ultimately to involve 
a weakening of the resources of the body politic.— 
Unto This Last , p. 35. 

Inequalities of wealth justly established, 'benefit 
the nation in the course of their establishment; 
and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence. 
That is to say, among every active and well-gov¬ 
erned people, the various strength of individuals, 
tested by full exertion and specially applied to vari¬ 
ous need, issues in unequal, but harmonious results, 
receiving reward or authority according to its class 
and service; while in the inactive or ill-governed 
nation, the gradations of decay and the victories 
of treason work out also their own rugged systen 
of subjection and success: and substitute, for the 
melodious inequalities of concurrent power, the in¬ 
iquitous dominances and depressions of guilt and 
misfortune .—Unto This Last , p. 33. 

Where does the Rich Man get his Means of 
Living? —Well, for the point in question then, as 
to means of living : the most exemplary manner of 
answer is simply to state how I got my own, or 
rather how my father got them for me. He and his 
partners entered into what your correspondent 
mellifluously styles “ a mutually beneficent jjart- 
nersliip,” with certain laborers in Spain. These 
laborers produced from the earth annually a cer¬ 
tain number of bottles of wine. These productions 
were sold by my father and his partners, who kept 
nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of the price themselves, 
and gave one-tenth, or thereabouts, to the laborers. 
In which state of mutual beneficence my father and 
his partners naturally became rich, and the laborers 
as naturally remained poor. Then my good father 


SOCIAL FIIILOSOrilY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 10, 


gave all his money to me (who never did a stroke 
of work in my life worth my salt, not to mention 
my dinner).— Arrows of the Chace, II., p. 73. 

Money and its Uses. —You will find that wher¬ 
ever and whenever men are endeavoring to make 
money hastily, and to avoid the labor which Prov¬ 
idence has appointed to be the only source of hon¬ 
orable profit;—and also wherever and whenever 
they permit themselves to spend it luxuriously, 
without reflecting how far they are misguiding the 
labor of others;—there and then, in either case, 
they are literally and infallibly causing, for their 
own benefit or their own pleasure, a certain annual 
number of human deaths; that, therefore, the choice 
given to every man born into this world is, simply, 
whether he will be a laborer or an assassin; and 
that whosoever has not his hand on the Stilt of the 
plough, has it on the Hilt of the dagger.— The Two 
Paths, p. 130. 

The Upper Classes.— The upper classes, broad¬ 
ly speaking, are always originally composed of 
the best-bred (in the merely animal sense of the 
term), the most energetic, and most thoughtful, of 
the population, who either by strength of arm 
seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of 
them, or bring desert land into cultivation, over 
which they have therefore, within certain limits, 
true personal right; or by industry, accumulate 
other property, or by choice devote themselves to 
intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an 
acknowledged superiority of position, shown by 
benefits conferred in discovery, or in teaching, or 
in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of 
the law of nature. . . . 

The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is 
to keep order among their inferiors, and raise them 
always to the nearest level with themselves of which 
those inferiors are capable. So far as they are thus 
occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced 
intensely by all beneath them, and reach, them¬ 
selves, the highest types of human power and 
beauty.— Time and Tide, pp. 93, 94. 


198 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY . 


How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul 
out of a great many persons, in order to put the ab¬ 
stracted psychical quantities together, and make 
one very beautiful or ideal soul? . . . We live, 
we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the manner 
of weasels; that is to say, we keep a certain num¬ 
ber of clowns digging and ditching, and generally 
stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis, may 
have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves. Yet 
there is a great deal to be said for this. A highly 
bred and trained English, French, Austrian or Ital¬ 
ian gentleman (much more a lady) is a great pro¬ 
duction; a better production than most statues; 
being beautifully colored as well as shaped, and 
plus all the brains; a glorious thing to look at, a 
wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot have 
it, any more than a pyramid or a church, but by 
sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is, per¬ 
haps, better to build a beautiful human creature 
than a beautiful dome or steeple, and more delight¬ 
ful to look up reverently to a creature far above 
us, than to a wall; only the beautiful human crea¬ 
ture will have some duties to do in return—duties 
of living belfry and rampart .—Sesame and Lilies , 
jp^53. 

The Opportunities and Power of the Rich.— 
You may stretch out your sceptre over the heads of 
the English laborers, and say to.them, as they stoop 
to its waving, “ Subdue this obstacle that has baffled 
our fathers; put away this plague that consumes 
our children ; water these dry places, plough these 
desert ones; carry this food to those who are in 
hunger; carry this light to those who are in dark¬ 
ness ; carry this life to those who are in death; ” or 
on the other side you may say to her laborers: 
“Here am I; this power is in my hand; come, 
build a mound here for me to be throned upon, high 
and wide; come, make crowns for my head, that 
men may see them shine from far away; come, 
weave tapestries for my feet, that I may tread softly 
on the silk and purple; come, dance before me, that 
I may be gay; and sing sweetly to me, that I may 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 199 


slumber; so shall I live in joy, and die in honor.” 
And better than such an honorable death, it were 
that the day had perished wherein we were born, 
and the night in which it was said, There is a child 
conceived .—A Joy For Ever , p. 82. 

It is nothing to give pension and cottage to the 
widow who has lost her son; it is nothing to give 
food and medicine to the workman who has broken 
his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in sickness. 
But it is something to use your time and strength 
to war with the waywardness and thoughtlessness 
of mankind; to keep the erring workman in your 
service till you have made him an unerring one; 
and to direct your fellow-merchant to the oppor¬ 
tunity which his dulness would have lost .—A Joy 
For Ever, pp. 81, 82. 

You would be indignant if you saw a strong man 
walk into a theatre or a lecture-room, and, calmly 
choosing the best place, take his feeble neighbor by 
the shoulder, and turn him out of it into the back 
seats, or the street. You would be equally indig¬ 
nant if you saw a stout fellow thrust himself up to 
a table where some hungry children were being fed, 
and reach his arm over their heads and take their 
bread from them. But you are not the least indig¬ 
nant if when a man has stoutness of thought and 
swiftness of capacity, and, instead of being long- 
armed only, has the much greater gift of being 
long-headed—you think it perfectly just that he 
should use his intellect to take the bread out of the 
mouths of all the other men in the town who are of 
the same trade with him; or use his breadth and 
sweep of sight to gather some branch of the com¬ 
merce of the country into one great cobweb, of 
which he is himself to be the central spider, making 
every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, 
and commanding every avenue with the facets of 
his eyes. You see no injustice in this. 

But there is injustice; and, let us trust, one of 
which honorable men will at no very distant period 
disdain to be guilty .—A Joy For Ever, pp. 80, 81. 


200 


A Ii US KIN' ANTIIOLOG Y. 


Advice to Rich Wordlings-—Is the earth only 
an hospital ? Play, if you care to play, on the floor 
of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what 
crowns please you; gather the dust of it for treas¬ 
ure, and die rich in that, clutching at the black 
motes in the air with your dying hands;—and yet, 
it may be well with you. But if this life be no 
dream, and the world no hospital; if all the peace 
and power and joy you can ever win, must be won 
now; and all fruit of victory gathered here, or 
never;—will you still, throughout the puny totality 
of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity ? 
If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there 
none you might presently take ? was this grass of 
the earth made green for your shroud only, not 
for your bed ? and can you never lie down upon it, 
but only under it? The heathen, to whose creed 
you have returned, thought not so. They knew 
that life brought its contest, but they expected from 
it also the crown of all contest: No proud one! no 
jewelled circlet flaming through Heaven above the 
height of the unmerited throne; only some few 
leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, through 
a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, 
they thought; but Jupiter was poor; this was the 
best the god could give them. Seeking a greater 
than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in 
war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any 
happiness to be found for them—only in kindly 
peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of 
wild olive, mark you :—the tree that grows care¬ 
lessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no 
verdure of branch; only with soft snow of blossom, 
and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and 
thorn-set stem; no fastening of diadem for you but 
with such sharp embroidery ! But this, such as it 
is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey 
honor and sweet rest .—Crownof Wild Olive, Preface, 
p. 15. 

The Eidolon or Phantasm of Wealth. —A 
man’s power over his property is at the widest 
range of it, fivefold; it is power of Use, for himself, 




SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 201 


Administration, to others, Ostentation, Destruc¬ 
tion, or Bequest: and possession is in use only, 
which for each man is sternly limited; so that such 
things, and so much of them as he can use, are, in¬ 
deed, well for him, or Wealth; and more of them, or 
any other things, are ill for him, or Illth. Plunged 
to the lips in Orinoco, he shall drink to his thirst- 
measure; more, at his peril: with a thousand oxen 
on his lands, he shall eat to his hunger-measure; 
more, at his peril, lie cannot live in two houses at 
once; a few bales of silk or wool will suffice for the 
fabric of all the clothes he can ever wear, and a few 
books will probably hold all the furniture good for 
his brain. Beyond these, in the best of us but nar¬ 
row, capacities, we have but the power of adminis¬ 
tering, or waZ-administering, wealth: (that is to say, 
distributing, lending, or increasing it);—of exhibit¬ 
ing it (as in magnificence of retinue or furniture),— 
of destroying, or, finally, of bequeathing it. And 
with multitudes of rich men, administration degen¬ 
erates into curatorship; they merely hold their 
property in charge, as Trustees, for the benefit of 
some person or persons to whom it is to be delivered 
upon their death; and the position, explained in 
clear terms, would hardly seem a covetable one. 
What would be the probable feelings of a youth, 
on his entrance into life, to whom the career hoped 
for him was proposed in terms such as these : “You 
must work unremittingly, and with your utmost 
intelligence, during all your available years, you 
will thus accumulate wealth to a large amount; 
but you must touch none of it, beyond what is 
needful for your support. Whatever sums you 
gain, beyond those required for your decent and 
moderate maintenance, and whatever beautiful 
things you may obtain possession of, shall be prop¬ 
erly taken care of by servants, for whose mainte¬ 
nance you will be charged, and whom you will 
have the trouble of superintending, and on your 
death-bed you shall have the power of determining 
to whom the accumulated property shall belong, 
or to what purposes be applied.” 


202 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


The labor of life, under such conditions, would 
probably be neither zealous nor cheerful; yet the 
only difference between this position and that of the 
ordinary capitalist is the power which the latter 
supposes himself to possess, and which is attributed 
to him by others, of spending his money at any 
moment. This pleasure, taken in the imagination 
of power to part with that with which we hare no in¬ 
tention of parting, is one of the most curious, though 
commonest forms of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of 
Wealth. But the political economist has nothing 
to do with this idealism, and looks only to the prac¬ 
tical issue of it—namely, that the holder of wealth, 
in such temper, may be regarded simply as a 
mechanical means of collection; or as a money- 
chest with a slit in it, not only receptant but suc- 
tional, set in the public thoroughfare;—chest of 
which only Death has the key, and evil Chance the 
distribution of the contents.— Munera Pulveris, pp. 
36, 37. 

Large Fortunes can not Honestly be made 
by One Man. —No man can become largely rich by 
his personal toil.* The work of his own hands, 
wisely directed, will indeed always maintain him¬ 
self and his family, and make fitting provision for 
his age. Ihit it is only by the discovery of some 
method of taxing the labor of others that he can be¬ 
come opulent. Every increase of his capital enables 
him to extend this taxation more widely ; that is, to 
invest larger funds in the maintenance of laborers, 
—to direct, accordingly, vaster and yet vaster masses 
of labor, and to appropriate its profits. 

Large fortunes cannot honestly be made by the 
work of one man’s hands or head. If his work bene¬ 
fits multitudes, and involves position of high trust, 
it may be (I do not say that it is) expedient to re¬ 
ward him with great wealth or estate ; but fortune 
of this kind is freely given in gratitude for benefit, 


* By his art he may; but only when its produce, or the sight 
or hearing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable 
the artist to tax the labor of multitudes highly, in exchange for 
his own. 




SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 203 

not as repayment for labor. Also, men of peculiar 
genius in any art, if the public cau enjoy the pro¬ 
duct of their genius, may set it at almost any price 
they choose ; but this, I will show you when I come 
to speak of art, is unlawful on their part, and ruin¬ 
ous to their own powers. . . . 

Such fortunes as are now the prizes of commerce 
can be made only in one of three ways :— 

1. By obtaining command over the labor of mul¬ 
titudes of other men, and taxing it for oilr own 
profit. 

2. By treasure-trove,—as of mines, useful vege¬ 
table products, and the like,—in circumstances put¬ 
ting them under our own exclusive control. 

3. By speculation (commercial gambling). 

The two first of these means of obtaining riches 
are, in some forms and within certain limits, lawful, 
and advantageous to the State. The third is en¬ 
tirely detrimental to it; for in all cases of profit 
derived from speculation, at best, what one man 
gains another loses; and the net result to the State 
is zero (pecuniarily), with the loss of the time and 
ingenuity spent in the transaction ; besides the dis¬ 
advantage involved in the discouragement of the 
losing party, and the corrupted moral natures of 
both. This is the result of speculation at its best. 
At its worst, not only B. loses what A. gains (having 
taken his fair risk of such loss for his fair chance of 
gain), but C. and D., who never had any chance at 
all, are drawn in by B.’s fall, and the final result is 
that A. sets up his carriage on the collected sum 
which was once the means of living to a dozen fami¬ 
lies.— Time and Tide , p. 61. 

Noblesse oblige.— This ought to be the first 
lesson of every rich man’s political code. “ Sir,” 
his tutor should early say to him, “you are so 
placed in society—it may be for your misfortune, 
it must be for your trial—that you are likely to be 
maintained all your life by the labor of other men. 
You will have to make shoes for nobody, but some 
one will have to make a great many for you. You 
will have to dig ground for nobody, but some one 



204 


A RUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


will heave to dig through every summer’s hot 
day for you. You will build houses and make 
clothes for no one, but many a rough hand must 
knead clay, and many an elbow be crooked to the 
stitch, to keep that body of yours warm and fine. 
Now remember, whatever you and your work may 
be worth, the less your keep costs, the better. It 
does not cost money only. It costs degradation. 
You do not merely employ these people. You also 
tread upon them. It cannot be helped;—you have 
your place, and they have theirs; but see that you 
tread as lightly as possible, and on as few as pos¬ 
sible. What food, and clothes, and lodging you 
honestly need, for your health and peace, you may 
righteously take. See that you take the plainest 
you can serve yourself with—that you waste or 
wear nothing vainly;—and that you emply no man 
in furnishing you with any useless luxury .”—Time 
and Tide, p. 89. 

Riches a Form of Strength.—1 do not coun¬ 
tenance one whit, the common socialist idea of di¬ 
vision of property; division of property is its de¬ 
struction; and with it the destruction of all hope, 
all industry, and all justice : it is simply chaos—a 
chaos towards which the believers in modern polit¬ 
ical economy are fast tending, and from which I 
am striving to save them. The rich man does not 
keep back meat from the poor by retaining his 
riches; but by basely using them. Riches are a 
form of strength; and a strong man does not injure 
others by keeping his strength, but by using it in¬ 
juriously. The socialist, seeing a strong man op¬ 
press a weak one, cries out—“Break the strong 
man’s arms; ” but I say, “ Teach him to use them 
to better purpose.” The fortitude and intelligence 
which acquire riches are intended, by the Giver of 
both, not to scatter, nor to give away, but to em¬ 
ploy those riches in the service of mankind; in 
other words, in the redemption of the erring and 
aid of the weak—that is to say, there is first to £>e 
the Work to gain money; then the Sabbath of use 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 205 


v for it—the Sabbath, whose law is, not to lose life, 
but to save.— Unto This Last, p. 84. 

Yet, in some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour, 
I can even imagine that England may cast all 
thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric 
nations among whom they first arose; and that, 
while the sands of the Indus and adamant of Gol- 
conda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, 
and flash from the turban of the slave, she, as a 
Christian mother, may at last attain to the virtues 
and the treasures of a Heathen one, and be able to 
lead forth her Sons, saying,—“ These are my Jew¬ 
els.”— Unto This Last, p. 42. 

Capital. —The best and simplest general type of 
capital is a well-made ploughshare. Now, if that 
ploughshare did nothing but beget other plough¬ 
shares, in a polypous manner,—however the great 
cluster of polypous plough might glitter in the sun, 
it would have lost its function of capital. It be¬ 
comes true capital only by another kind of splen¬ 
dor,—when it is seen, “ splendescere sulco,” to 
grow bright in the furrow; rather with diminution 
of its substance, than addition, by the noble fric¬ 
tion. And the true home question, to every cap¬ 
italist and to every nation, is not, “how many 
ploughs have you ? ”—but, “ where are your fur¬ 
rows ? ” not—“ how quickly will this capital repro¬ 
duce itself?”—but, “what will it do during re¬ 
production?” What substance will it furnish, 
good for life ? what work construct, protective of 
life ? if none, its own reproduction is useless—if 
worse than none,—(for capital may destroy life as 
well as support it), its own reproduction is worse 
than useless.— Unto This Last, p. 78. 

If, having certain funds for supporting labor at 
my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground 
in order, my money is, in that function, spent once 
for all; but if I pay them to dig iron out of my 
ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent 
for the ground, and percentage both on the manu¬ 
facture and the sale, and make my cax>ital profita- 


206 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


ble in these three bye-ways. The greater part of 
the profitable investment of capital, in the present 
day, is in operations of this kind, in which the pub¬ 
lic is persuaded to buy something of no use to it, on 
production, or sale, of which, the capitalist may 
charge percentage; the said public remaining all 
the while under the persuasion that the percentages 
thus obtained are real national gains, whereas, they 
are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, 
to swell heavy ones.— Crown of Wild Olive , Preface, 

p. 8. 

If I were to put a turnpike on the road where it 
passes my own gate, and endeavor to exact a shil¬ 
ling from every passenger, the public would soon 
do away with my gate, without listening to any plea 
on my part that “ it was as advantageous to them, 
in the end, that I should spend their shillings, as 
that they themselves should.” But if, instead of 
out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only per¬ 
suade them to come in and buy stones, or old iron, 
or any other useless thing, out of my ground, I may 
rob them to the same extent, and be, moreover, 
thanked as a public benefactor, and promoter of 
commercial prosperity.— Crown of Wild Olive , Pref¬ 
ace, p. 9. 

Origin of Riches and Poverty.— Suppose that 
three men formed a little isolated republic, and 
found themselves obliged to separate in order to 
farm different pieces of land at some distance from 
each other along the coast; each estate furnishing 
a distinct kind of produce, and each more or less in 
need of the material raised on the other. Suppose 
that the third man, in order to save the time of all 
three, undertakes simply to superintend the trans¬ 
ference of commodities from one farm to the other; 
on condition of receiving some sufficiently remun¬ 
erative share of every parcel of goods conveyed, or 
of some other parcel received in exchange for it. 

If this carrier or messenger always brings to each 
estate, from the other, what is chiefly wanted, at 
the right time, the operations of the two farmers 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 207 

will go on prosperously, and the largest possible re¬ 
sult in produce, or wealth, will be attained by the 
little coin hi unity. But suppose no intercourse be¬ 
tween the land-owners is possible, except through 
the travelling agent; and that, after a time, this 
agent, watching the course of each man’s agricul¬ 
ture, keeps back the articles with which he has been 
entrusted, until there comes a period of extreme ne¬ 
cessity for them, on one side or other, and then ex¬ 
acts in exchange for them all that the distressed 
farmer can spare of other kinds of produce; it is 
easy to see that by ingeniously watching his oppor¬ 
tunities, he might possess himself regularly of the 
greater part of the superfluous produce of the two 
estates, and at last, in some year of severest trial or 
scarcity, purchase both for himself, and maintain 
the former proprietors thenceforward as his laborers 
or his servants. 

This would be a case of commercial wealth ac- 
quired on theexactest principles of modern political 
economy. But, ... it is manifest that the wealth 
of the State, or of the three men considered as a 
society, is collectively less than it would have been 
had the merchant been content with juster profit. 
The operations of the two agriculturists have been 
cramped to the utmost; and the continual limita¬ 
tions of the supply of things they wanted at critical 
times, together with the failure of courage conse¬ 
quent on the prolongation of a struggle for mere 
existence, without any sense of permanent gain, 
must have seriously diminished the effective results 
of their labor; and the stores finally accumulated 
in the merchant’s hands will not in anywise be of 
equivalent value to those which, had his dealings 
been honest, would have filled at once the granaries 
of the farmers and his own .—Unto This Last , pp. 
37, 38. 

Again, let us imagine a society of peasants, living 
on a river-shore, exposed to destructive inundation 
at somewhat extended intervals ; and that each 
peasant possesses of this good, but imperilled, 
ground, more than he needs‘to cultivate for imme- 


208 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


diate subsistence. We will assume farther (and 
with too great probability of justice), that the 
greater part of them indolently keep in tillage just 
as much land as supplies them with daily food ;— 
that they leave their children idle, and take no pre¬ 
cautions against the rise of the stream. But one of 
them, (we will say but one, for the sake of greater 
clearness) cultivates carefully all the ground of his 
estate; makes his children work hard and healthily; 
uses his spare time and theirs in building a rampart 
against the river; and, at the end of some years, 
has in his storehouses large reserves of food and 
clothing, in his stables a well-tended breed of cat¬ 
tle, and around his fields a wedge of Avail against 
flood. 

The torrent rises at last—sweeps away the har¬ 
vests, and half the cottages of the careless peasants, 
and leaves them destitute. They naturally come 
for help to the proAdderit one, Avhose fields are un¬ 
wasted, and whose granaries are full. lie has the 
right to refuse it to them: no one disputes this 
right. But he will probably not refuse it; it is not 
his interest to do so, even were he entirely selfish 
and cruel. The only question with him will be on 
what terms his aid is to be granted. 

Clearly, not on terms of mere charity. To main¬ 
tain his neighbors in idleness Avould be not only his 
ruin, but theirs. He will require work from them, 
in exchange for their maintenance; and, whether 
in kindness or cruelty, all the work they can give. 
Not now the three or four hours they were wont 
to spend on their own land, but the eight or ten 
hours they ought to have spent. But how will he 
apply this labor? The men are now his slaves;-^ 
nothing less, and nothing more. On pain of starva¬ 
tion, he can force them to work in the manner, and 
to the end, he chooses. And it is by his wisdom 
in this choice that the Avorthiness of his mastership 
is proved, or its unAvortliiness. EA r idently, he must 
first set them to bank out the water in some tem¬ 
porary Avay, and to get their ground cleansed and 
resown; else, in any case, their continued mainte- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 209 


nance will be impossible. That done, and while he 
has still to feed them, suppose he makes them raise 
a secure rampart for their own ground against all 
future flood, and rebuild their houses in safer 
places, with the best material they can find; being 
allowed time out of their working hours to fetch 
such material from a distance. And for the food 
and clothing advanced, he takes security in land 
that as much shall be returned at a convenient 
period. 

We may conceive this security to be redeemed, 
and the debt paid at the end of a few years. The 
prudent peasant has sustained no loss; but is no 
richer than he was , and has had all his trouble for 
nothing. But he has enriched his neighbors materi¬ 
ally; bettered their houses, secured their land, and 
rendered them, in worldly matters, equal to him¬ 
self. In all rational and final sense, he has been 
throughout their true Lord and King. 

We will next trace his probable line of conduct, 
presuming his object to be exclusively the increase 
of his own fortune. After roughly recovering and 
cleansing the ground, he allows the ruined peas¬ 
antry only to build huts upon it, such as he thinks 
protective enough from the weather to keep them 
in working health. The rest of their time he occu¬ 
pies, first in pulling down, and rebuilding on a 
inagnificient scale, his own house, and in adding 
large dependencies to it. This done, in exchange 
for his continued supply of corn, he buys as much 
of his neighbors’ land as he thinks he can super¬ 
intend the management of; and makes the former 
owners securely embank and protect the ceded por¬ 
tion. By this arrangement, he leaves to a certain 
number of the peasantry only as much ground as 
will just maintain them in their existing numbers; 
as the population increases, he takes the extra 
hands, who cannot be maintained on the narrowed 
estates, for his own servants; employs some to cul¬ 
tivate the ground he has bought, giving them of its 
produce merely enough for subsistence; with the 
surplus, which, under his energetic and careful 





210 


A IiUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


superintendence, will be large, lie maintains a train 
of servants for state, and a body of workmen, whom 
he educates in ornamental arts. He now can splen¬ 
didly decorate his house, lay out its grounds mag¬ 
nificently, and richly supply his table, and that 
of his household and retinue. And thus, without 
any abuse of right, we should find established all 
the phenomena of poverty and riches, which (it is 
supposed necessarily) accompany modern civiliza¬ 
tion. In one part of the district, we should have 
unhealthy land, miserable dwellings, and half- 
starved poor; in another, a well-ordered estate, 
well-fed servants, and refined conditions’of highly 
educated and luxurious life .—Munera Pulveris , pp. 
115-17. 


War and National Taxation.— Everybody in 
France who is got any money is eager to lend it to 
M. Thiers at five per cent. No doubt, but who is to 
pay the five per cent. ? . . . 

The people who have got no money to lend pay 
it; the daily worker and producer pays it—unfor¬ 
tunate “ William.” . . . And the people who are 
to get their five per cent, out of him 2 and roll him 
and suck him,—the sugar-cane of a William that 
he is,—how should they but think the arrangement 
a glorious one for the nation ? 

So there is great acclaim and triumphal proces¬ 
sion of financiers ! and the arrangement is made; 
namely, that all the poor laboring persons in 
France are to pay the rich idle ones five per cent, 
annually, on the sum of eighty millions of sterling 
pounds, until further notice. 

But this is not all, observe. Sweet William is not 
altogether so soft in his rind that you can crush 
him without some sufficient machinery : you must 
have your army in good order, “to justify public 
confidence;” and you must get the expense of that, 
besides your five per cent., out of ambrosial Wil¬ 
liam. lie must pay the cost of his own roller. 

Now, therefore, see briefly what it all comes to. 

First, you spend eighty millions of money in lire- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 211 

works, doing no end of damage in letting them 

off. 

Then you borrow money to pay the firework- 
maker’s bill, from any gain-loving persons who 
have got it. 

And then, dressing your bailiff’s men in new red 
coats and cocked hats, you send them drumming 
and trumpeting into the fields, to take the peasants 
by the throat, and make them pay the interest on 
what you have borrowed, and the expense of the 
cocked hats besides; 

That is “ financiering,” my friends, as the mob of 
the money-makers understand it. And they under¬ 
stand it well. Tor that is what it always comes to 
finally; taking the peasant by the throat, lie must 
pay—for he only can . Food can only be got out of 
the ground, and all these devices of soldiership,and 
law, and arithmetic, are but ways of getting at last 
down to him, the furrow-driver, and snatching the 
roots from him as he digs.— Fors , I., pp. 103-105. 

Capitalists, when they do not know what to do 
with their money, persuade the peasants, in various 
countries, that the said peasants want guns to shoot 
each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow 
guns, out of the manufacture of which the cap¬ 
italists get a percentage, and men of science much 
amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a 
certain number of each other, until they get tired; 
and burn each other’s homes down in various 
places. Then they put the guns back into towers, 
arsenals, etc., in ornamental patterns; (and the 
victorious party put also some ragged flags in 
churches). And then the capitalists tax both, an¬ 
nually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan 
of the guns and gunpowder. And that is what 
capitalists call “ knowing what to do with their 
money;” and what commercial men in general call 
“ practical ” as opposed to “ sentimental ” Political 
Economy .—Munera Pulveris , p. 15. 

A Civilized Nation.— This, in Modern Europe, 
consists essentially of (A), a mass of lialf-tauglit, dis- 


212 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


contented, and mostly penniless populace, calling it¬ 
self the people; of (B) a thing which it calls a govern¬ 
ment—meaning an apparatus for collecting and 
spending money; and (C) a small number of capi¬ 
talists, many of them rogues, and most of them 
stupid persons, who have no idea of any object of 
human existence other than money-making, gamb¬ 
ling, or champagne-bibbing. A certain quantity of 
literary men, saying anything they can get paid to 
say,—of clergymen, saying anything they have been 
taught to say,—of natural philosophers, saying any¬ 
thing that comes into their heads,—and of nobility, 
saying nothing at all, combine in disguising the ac¬ 
tion, and perfecting the disorganization, of the mass; 
but with respect to practical business, the civilized 
nation consists broadly of mob, money-collecting 
machine, and capitalist. 

Now when this civilized mob wants to spend 
money for any profitless or mischievous purposes, 
—fireworks, illuminations, battles, driving about 
from place to place, or what not,—being itself pen¬ 
niless, it sets its money-collecting machine to bor¬ 
row the sum needful for these amusements from the 
civilized capitalist. 

The civilized capitalist lends the money, on con¬ 
dition thatj through the money-collecting machine; 
he may tax the civilized mob thenceforward for 
ever. The civilized mob spends the money forth¬ 
with, in gunpowder, infernal machines, masquerade 
dresses, new boulevards, or anything else it lias set 
its idiotic mind on for the moment; and appoints 
its money-collecting machine to collect a daily tax 
from its children, and children’s children, to be paid 
to the capitalists from whom it had received the ac¬ 
commodation, thenceforward for ever. 


That is the nature of a National Debt.— Fors, III., 
p. 237. 



A National Debt, like any other, may be honest¬ 
ly incurred in case of need, and honestly paid in due 
time. But if a man should be ashamed to borrow, 
much more should a people ; and if a father holds 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 213 


it his honor to provide for his children, and would 
be ashamed to borrow from them, and leave, with 
his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren 
to pay, much more should a nation be ashamed to 
borrow, in any case, or in any manner; and if it 
borrow at all, it is at least in honor bound to bor¬ 
row from living men, and not indebt itself to its own 
unborn brats. If it can’t provide for them, at least 
let it not send their cradles to the pawnbroker, and 
pick the pockets of their first breeches.— Fors, III., 
p. 47. 

An Income Tax the only just one.— In true 
justice, the only honest and wholly right tax is one 
not merely on income, but property; increasing in 
percentage as the property is greater. And the 
main virtue of such a tax is that it makes publicly 
known wdiat every man has, and how he gets it. 

For every kind of Vagabonds, high and low, agree 
in their dislike to give an account of the way they 
get their living; still less, of how much they have 
got sewn up in their breeches. It does not, how¬ 
ever, matter much to a country that it should know 
how its poor Vagabonds live; but it is of vital mo¬ 
ment that it should know how its rich Vagabonds 
live.— Fors, I., p. 98. 

Why the weekly Bills are doubled.— The 
weekly bills are double, because the greater part of 
the labor of the people of England is spent unpro- 
ductively; that is to say, in producing iron plates, 
iron guns, gunpowder, infernal machines, infernal 
fortresses floating about, infernal fortresses stand¬ 
ing still, infernal means of mischievous locomotion, 
infernal lawsuits, infernal parliamentary elocution, 
infernal beer, and infernal gazettes, magazines, 
statues, and pictures. Calculate the labor spent in 
producing these infernal articles annually, and put 
against it the labor spent in producing food ! The 
only wonder is, that the weekly bills are not tenfold 
instead of double. For this poor housewife, mind 
you, cannot feed her children with any one, or any 
quantity, of these infernal articles. Children can 


214 


A BUSKIN' ANTHOLOGY. 


only be fed with divine articles. Their mother can 
indeed get to London cheap, but she has no business 
there; she can buy all the morning’s news for a half¬ 
penny, but she has no concern with them; she can 
see Gustave Lore’s pictures (and she had better see s 
the devil), for a shilling; she can be carried through 
any quantity of filthy streets on a tramway for 
threepence; but it is as much as her life’s worth to 
walk in them, or as her modesty’s worth to look into 
a print shop in them. Nay, let her have but to go 
on foot a quarter of a mile in the West End, she 
dares not take her purse in her pocket, nor let her 
little dog follow her. These are her privileges and 
facilities, in the capital of civilization. But none of 
these will bring meat or flour into her own village. 
Far the contrary ! The sheep and corn which the 
fields of her village produce are carried away from 
it to feed the makers of Armstrong guns. And her 
weekly bills are double.— Fors, I., p. 418. 


POVERTY. 

Among the various characteristics of the age in 
which we live, as compared with other ages of this 
not yet very experienced world, one of the most 
notable appears to me to be the just and wholesome 
contempt in which we hold i>overty.— J 0 y For Ever 
p. 7. 

The mistake of the best men through generation 
after generation, has been that great one of think¬ 
ing to help the poor by almsgiving, and by preach¬ 
ing of patience or of hope, and by every other 
means, emollient or consolatory, except the one 
thing which God orders for them, justice .—Unto 
This Last, p. 45. 

Ye sheep without shepherd, it is not the pasture 
that has been shut from you, but the presence. 
Meat! perhaps your right to that may be plead¬ 
able; but other rights have to be pleaded first. 
Claim your crumbs from the table, if you will; but 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 215 

claim them as children, not as dogs; claim your 
right to be fed, but claim more loudly your right to 
be holy, perfect, and pure. 

Strange words to be used of working people : 
“ What! holy; without any long robes nor anoint¬ 
ing oils; these rough-jacketed, rough-worded per¬ 
sons; set to nameless and dishonored service? 
Perfect!—these, with dim eyes and cramped limbs, 
and slowly wakening minds? Pure !—these, with 
sensual desire and grovelling thought; foul of body, 
and coarse of soul ? ” It may be so ; nevertheless, 
such as they are, they are the holiest, perfectest, 
purest persons the earth can at present show. They 
may be what you have said; but if so, they yet are 
holier than we, who have left them thus.— Unto 
This Last, p. 85. 

Six thousand years of weaving, and have we 
learned to weave ? Might not every naked wall 
have been purple with tapestry, and every feeble 
breast fenced with sweet colors from the cold ? 
What have we done ? Our fingers are too few, it 
seems, to twist together some poor covering for our 
bodies. We set our streams to work for us, and 
choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning-wheels 
—and,— are we yet clothed i Are not the streets of 
the capitals of Europe foul with the sale of cast 
clouts and rotten rags ? Is not the beauty of your 
sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, 
while, with better honor, nature clothes the brood 
of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf 
in her den ? And does not every winter’s snow robe 
what you have not robed, and shroud what you 
have not shrouded ; and every winter’s wind bear 
up to heaven its wasted souls, to witness against 
you hereafter, by the voice of their Christ,—“ I was 
naked, and ye clothed me not?”— Mystery of Life, 
pp. 124, 125. 

The ant and the moth have cells for each of their 
young, but our little ones lie in festering heaps, in 
homes that consume them like graves; and night 
by night from the corners of our streets, rises up 


216 


A jHUSKIN’ ANTHOLOGY. 


the cry of the homeless—“ I was a stranger, and ye 
took me not in .”—Mystery of Life, p. 126. 

The little Girl with large Shoes.— One day 
in November, 1873, at Oxford, as I was going in at 
the private door of the University galleries, to give 
a lecture on the Fine Arts in Florence, I was hin¬ 
dered for a moment by a nice little girl, whipping 
a top on the pavement; She was a bery nice little 
girl; and rejoiced wholly in her Whip, hndtop; but 
could not inflict the reviving chastisement with all 
the activity that Was in hdr, because she had on a 
large and dilapidated pair of woman’s shoes; which 
projected the full length of her own little foot be¬ 
hind it and before; and being securely fastened to 
her ankles in the manner of mocassins; admitted, 
indeed, of dexterous glissades, and other modes of 
progress quite sufficient for ordinary purposes; but 
not conveniently of all the evolutions proper to the 
pursuit of a whipping-top. 

There were some worthy poopie at my lecture, 
and I think the lecture was one of my best. It 
gave some really trustworthy information about 
art in Florence six hundred years ago. But all the 
time I was speaking, I knew that nothing spoken 
about art, either by myself or other people, could 
be of the least use to anybody there. For their 
primary business, and mine, was with art in Ox¬ 
ford, now; not with art in Florence, then; and art 
in Oxford now was absolutely dependent on our 
power of solving the question—which I knew that 
my audience would not even allow to be proposed 
for solution—“ Why have our little girls large 
shoes ?”— Fors, II., p. 130. 

The Savoyard Cottage. —On a green knoll 
above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and 
Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, 
inhabited by a well-doing family—man and wife, 
three children, and the grandmother. I call it a 
cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the 
ground, wide at the bottom, so that the family 
might live round the fire; lighted by one small 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 217 


broken window, and entered by an unclosing door. 
The family, I say, was “ well-doing;” at least it was 
hopeful and cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, 
for Savoyards, pretty and active, but the husband 
threatened with decline, from exposure under the 
cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts 
between every plank of his chimney in the frosty 
nights. 

“ Why could he not plaster the chinks ? ” asks the 
practical reader. For the same reason that your 
child cannot wash its face and hands till you have 
washed them many a day for it, and will not wash 
them when it can, till you force it. 

I passed this cottage often in my walks, had its 
window and door mended; sometimes mended also 
a little the meal of sour bread and broth, and 
generally got kind greeting and smile from the face 
of young or old; which greeting, this year, narrowed 
itself into the half-recognizing stare of the elder 
child, and the old woman’s tears; for the father and 
mother were both dead,—one of sickness, the other 
of sorrow. It happened that I passed not alone, 
but with a companion, a practised English joiner, 
who, while these people were dying of cold, had 
been employed from six in the morning to six in the 
evening, for two months, in fitting, without nails, 
the panels of a single door in a large house in Lon¬ 
don. Three days of his work taken, at the right 
time, from fastening the oak panels with useless 
precision, and applied to fasten the larch timbers 
with decent strength, would have saved these Sa¬ 
voyards’ lives. He would have been maintained 
equally; (I suppose him equally paid for his work 
by the owner of the greater house, only the work not 
consumed Selfishly on his own walls;) and the two 
peasants, and eventually, probably their children, 
saved .—Munerci Pulveris , pp. 121-123. 

Labor and Capital.— The landlord, usurer, or 
labor-master, does not, and cannot, himself con¬ 
sume all the means of life he collects. He gives 
them to other persons, whom he employs in liis own 


218 


A HUSKIN' ANTHOLOGY. 


behalf—growers of champagne; jockeys; footmen; 
jewellers; builders; painters; musicians, and the 
like. The diversion of the labor of these persons 
from the production of food to the production of 
articles of luxury is very frequently, and, at the 
present day, very grievously, a cause of famine. 
But when the luxuries are produced, it becomes a 
quite separate question who is to have them, and 
whether the landlord and capitalist are entirely to 
monopolize the music, the painting, the architec¬ 
ture, the hand-service, the horse-service, and the 
sparkling champagne of the world. 

And it is gradually, in these days, becoming man¬ 
ifest to the tenants, borrowers, and laborers, that 
instead of paying these large sums into the hands 
of the landlords, lenders, and employers, that they 
may purchase music, painting, etc.; the tenants, 
borrowers, and workers, had better buy a little 
music and painting for themselves ! That, for in¬ 
stance, instead of the capitalist-employer’s paying 
three hundred pounds for a full-length portrait of 
himself, in the attitude of investing his capital, the 
united workmen had better themselves pay the 
three hundred pounds into the hands of the ingen¬ 
ious artist, for a painting, in the antiquated man¬ 
ner of Lionardo or Raphael, of some subject more 
religiously or historically interesting to them; and 
placed where they can always see it. And again, 
instead of paying three hundred pounds to the 
obliging landlord, that he may buy a box at the 
opera with it, whence to study the refinements of 
music and dancing, the tenants are beginning to 
think that they may as well keep their rents partly 
to themselves, and therewith pay some Wandering 
Willie to fiddle at their own doors; or bid some 
grey-haired minstrel 

“ Tune, to please a peasant’s ear, 

The harp a king had loved to hear.” 

And similarly the dwellers in the hut of the field, 
and garret of the city, are beginning to think that, 
instead of paying half-a-crown for the loan of half 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 219 


a fireplace, they had better keep their half-crown in 
% their pockets till they can buy for themselves a 
whole one. 

These are the views which are gaining ground 
among the poor; and it is entirely vain to endeavor 
to repress them by equivocations. They are founded 
on eternal laws; and although their recognition 
will long be refused, and their promulgation, re¬ 
sisted as it will be, partly by force, partly by false¬ 
hood, can only take place through incalculable 
confusion and misery, recognized they must be 
eventually; and with these three ultimate results: 
—that the usurer’s trade will be abolished utterly; 
—that the employer will be paid justly for his super¬ 
intendence of labor, but not for his capital; and 
the landlord paid for his superintendence of the 
cultivation of land, when he is able to direct it 
wisely :—that both he, and the employer of mechan¬ 
ical labor, will be recognized as beloved masters, if 
they deserve love, and as noble guides wdien they 
are capable of giving discreet guidance; but neither 
will be permitted to establish themselves any more 
as senseless conduits, through wliich the strength 
and riches of their native land are to be poured 
into the cup of the fornication of its Babylonian 
city of the Plain.— Fors, Ill., pp. 90, 91. 

The Laborer’s Pension.—A laborer serves his 
country with a spade, just as a man in the middle 
ranks of life serves it with a sword, pen, or lancet; 
if the service is less, and therefore the wages during 
health less, then the reward, when health is broken, 
may be less, but not, therefore, less honorable; and 
it ought to be quite as natural and straightforward 
a matter for a laborer to take his pension from 
his parish, because he has deserved well of his 
parish, as for a man in higher rank to take his 
pension from his country, because he has deserved 
well of his country. If there be any disgrace in 
coming to the parish, because it may imply im¬ 
providence in early life, much more is there dis. 
grace in coming to the government; since improvi- 


220 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


dence is far less justifiable in a highly educated 
than in an imperfectly educated man; and far less 
justifiable in a high rank, where extravagance 
must have been luxury, than in a low rank, where 
it may only have been comfort. So that* the real 
fact of the matter is, that people will take alms 
delightedly, consisting of a carriage and footmen, 
because those do not look like alms to the people 
in the street; but they will not take alms consisting 
only of bread and water and coals, because every¬ 
body would understand what those meant. Mind, 
I do not want any one to refuse the carriage who 
ought to have it; but neither do I want them to 
refuse the coals.— A Joy For Ever , pp. 92, 93. 

American Slavery and English.— There are 
two rocks in mid-sea, on each of which, neglected 
equally by instructive and commercial powers, a 
handful of inhabitants live as they may. Two 
merchants bid for the two properties, but not in 
the same terms. One bids for the people, buys 
them, and sets them to work, under pain of scourge; 
the other bids for the rock, buys it, and throws the 
inhabitants into the sea. The former is the Ameri¬ 
can, the latter the English method, of slavery; 
much is to be said for, and something against, 
both. . . . The fact is that slavery is not a politi¬ 
cal institution at all, but an inherent, natural, and 
eternal inheritance of a large portion of the human 
race—to whom, the more you give of their own free 
will, the more slaves they will make themselves.— 
Munera Pulveris, pp. 108, 109. 

Executions of the Poor at Sheffield.—As I 
am securely informed, from ten to twelve public 
exections of entirely innocent persons take place 
in Sheffield, annually, by crushing the persons 
condemned under large pieces of sandstone thrown 
at them by steam-engines; in order that the moral 
improvement of the public may be secured, by 
furnishing them with carving-knives sixpence a 
dozen cheaper than, without these executions, 
would be possible.— Fors, IV.> p. 138 j 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 221 


WORKINGMEN. 

When we get to the bottom of the matter, we 
find the inhabitants of this earth broadly divided 
into two great masses;—the peasant paymasters— 
spade In hand, original and imperial producers of 
turnips; and, waiting on them all round, a crowd 
of polite persons, modestly expectant of turnips, 
for some—too often theoretical—service.— Fors, I., 
p. 144. 

Advice to Workingmen.—You are to do good 
work, whether you live or die. . . . Mind your 
own business with your absolute heart and soul; 
but see that it is a good business first. That it is 
corn and sweet pease you are producing,—not gun¬ 
powder and arsenic. . . . But what are we to do 
against powder and petroleum, then ? What men 
may do; not what poisonous beasts may. If a 
wretch spits in your face, will you answer by 
spitting in his ? if he throw vitriol at you, will you 
go to the apothecary for a bigger bottle?— Fors , I., 
p. 99. 

Labor should be paid at a fixed Rate.— The 
natural and right system respecting all labor is, 
that it should be paid at a fixed rate, but the good 
workman employed, and the bad workman unem¬ 
ployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive 
system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer 
his work at half-price, and either take the place of 
the good, or force him by his competition to work 
for an inadequate sum.— Unto This Last , p. 14. 

Work of Head and Hand compared.— There 
must be work done by the arms, or none of us could 
live. There must be work done by the brains, or 
the life w'e get would not be worth having. And 
the same men cannot do both, There is rough work 
to be done, and rough men must do it; there is 
gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; 
and it is physically impossible that one class should 
do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of 


222 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by tne 
words, and to talk to the workman about the hon- 
orableness of manual labor, and the dignity of 
humanity. That is a grand old proverb of Sanclio 
Panza’s,, ‘ Fine words butter no parsnips;’ and I 
can tell you that, all over England just now, you 
workmen are buying a great deal too much butter 
at that dairy. Rough work, honorable or not, takes 
the life out of us; and the man who has been heav¬ 
ing clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an ex¬ 
press train against the north wind.all night, or 
holding a collier’s helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or 
whirling white hot iron at a furnace mouth, that 
man is not the same at the end of his day, or night, 
as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with 
everything comfortable about him, reading books, 
or classing butterflies, or painting pictures. If it is 
any comfort to you to be told that the rough work 
is the more honorable of the two, I should be sorry 
to take that much of consolation from you; and in 
some sense I need not. The rough work is at all 
events real, honest, and. generally, though not 
always, useful; while the fine work is, a great deal 
of it, foolish and false as well as fine, and therefore 
dishonorable; but when both kinds are equally 
well and worthily done, the head’s is the noble 
work, and the hand’s the ignoble .—Crown of Wild 
Olive , Lect. I., p. 30. 

The Commune of ’71.—Ouvrier and petroleuse; 
they are gone their way—to their death. But for 
these, the Virgin of France shall yet unfold the 
oriflamme above their graves, and lay her blanched 
lilies on their smirched dust. Yes, and for these, 
great Charles shall rouse his Roland, and bid him 
put ghostly trump to lip, and breathe a point of 
war; and the helmed Pucelle shall answer with a 
wood-note of Domremy;—yes, and for these the 
Louis they mocked, like his Master, shall raise his 
holy hands, and pray God’s peace.— Fors , I., p. 106. 

Masters. —The masters cannot bear to let any 
opportunity of gain escape them, and frantically 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 223 


rush at every gap and breach in the walls of For¬ 
tune, raging to be rich, and affronting with im¬ 
patient covetousness, every risk of ruin; while the 
men prefer three days of violent labor, and three 
days of drunkenness, to six days of moderate work 
and wise rest. There is no way in which a prin¬ 
cipal, who really desires to help his workmen, may 
do it more effectually than by checking these dis¬ 
orderly habits both in himself and them; keeping 
his own business operations on a scale which will 
enable him to pursue them securely, not yielding to 
temptations of precarious gain .—Unto This Last , 
p. 14. 

The hospitality of the inn need not be less con¬ 
siderate or true because the inn’s master lives in his 
occupation. Even in these days, I have had no 
more true or kind friend than the now dead Mrs. 
Eisenkraemer of the old Union Inn at Chamouni; 
and an innkeeper’s daughter in the Oberland taught 
me that it was still possible for a Swiss girl to be 
refined, imaginative, and pure-hearted, though she 
waited on her father’s guests, and though these 
guests were often vulgar and insolent English trav¬ 
ellers. For she had been bred in the rural districts 
of happy olden days.— Fors, II., p. 241. 

Supply and Demand.— There may be all manner 
of demands, all manner of supplies. The true po¬ 
litical economist regulates these; the false political 
economist leaves them to be regulated by (not 
Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final 
demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and 
the supply of it (by the broad-gauge line) would be 
very nearly equal to the demand at this day, unless 
there were here and there a swineherd or two who 
who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.— 
Arrows of the Chace, II., p. 96. 

I had the honor of being on the committee under 
the presidentship of the Lord Mayor of London, for 
the victualling of Paris after her surrender. It be¬ 
came, at one period of our sittings, a question of 
vital importance at what moment the law of demand 


224 


A HU SKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


and supply would come into operation, and what 
the operation of it would exactly be : the demand, 
on this occasion, being very urgent indeed; that of 
several millions of people within a few hours of 
utter starvation, for any kind of food whatsoever. 
Nevertheless, it was admitted, in the course of 
debate, to be probable that the divine principle of 
demand and supply might find itself at the eleventh 
hour, and some minutes over, in want of carts and 
horses; and we ventured so far to interfere with 
the divine principle as to provide carts and horses, 
with haste which proved, happily, in time for the 
need; but not a moment in advance of it. It was 
farther recognized by the committee that the divine 
principle of demand and supply would commence 
its operations by charging the poor of Paris twelve- 
pence for a penny’s worth of whatever they wanted; 
and would end its operations by offering them 
twelve-pence worth for a penny of whatever they 
didn’t want. Whereupon it was concluded by the 
committee that the tiny knot, on this special occa¬ 
sion, was scarcely “ dignus vindice ,” by the divine 
principle of demand and supply : and that we would 
venture, for once, in a profane manner, to provide 
for the poor of Paris what they wanted, when they 
wanted it. Which, to the value of the sums en¬ 
trusted to us, it will be remembered we succeeded 
in doing. 

But the fact is that the so-called “law,” which 
was felt to be false in this case of extreme exigence, 
is alike false in cases of less exigence. It is false 
always, and everywhere. Nay, to such an extent 
is its existence imaginary, that the vulgar econom¬ 
ists are not even agreed in their account of it; for 
some of them mean by it, only that prices are regu¬ 
lated by the relation between demand and supply, 
which is partly true; and others mean that the 
relation itself is one with the process of which it is 
unwise to interfere; a statement which is not only, 
as in the above instance, untrue; but accurately the 
reverse of the truth: for all wise economy, political 
or domestic, consists in the resolved maintenance 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 225 


of a given relation between supply and demand, 
other than the instinctive, or (directly) natural, 
on e.—Munera Pulveris, pp. 9,10. 


ON CO-OPERATION .* 

While, on the one hand^ there can be no ques¬ 
tion but that co-opera^on is better than unjust 
and tyrannous mastership, there is very great room 
for doubt whether it be better than a just and be¬ 
nignant mastership. 

At present you—every one of you—speak, and 
act, as if there were only one alternative; namely, 
between a system in which profits shall be divided 
in due proportion among all; and the present one, 
in which the workman is paid the least wages he 
will take, under the pressure of competition in the 
labor-market. But an intermediate method is 
conceivable; a method which appears to be more 
prudent, and in its ultimate results more just, than 
the co-operative one. An arrangement may be 
supposed, and I have good hope also may one day 
be effected, by which every subordinate shall be 
paid sufficient and regular wages, according to his 
rank; by which due provision shall be made out of 
the profits of the business for sick and superannu¬ 
ated workers; and by which the master being held 
responsible , as a minor king or governor , for the 
conduct as well as the comfort of all those under his 
rule , shall, on that condition, be permitted to re¬ 
tain to his own use the surplus profits of the busi¬ 
ness, which the fact of his being its master may be 
assumed to prove that he has organized by superior 
intellect and energy—Time and Tide, p. 12. 

• Bkantwood, Coniston, Lancashire, August, 1879. 

Dear Mr. Holyoake : I am not able to write you 
a pretty letter to-day, being sadly tired, but am 
very heartily glad to be remembered by you. But 


Compare Part II., Chapter IV. 




22G 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY . 


it utterly silences me that you should waste your 
time and energy in writing “ Histories of Co-opera¬ 
tion ” anywhere as yet. My dear Sir, you might as 
well write the history of the yellow spot in an egg— 
in two volumes. Co-operation is as yet—in any 
true sense—as impossible as the crystallization of 
Thames mud. . . . The one calamity which I per¬ 
ceive or dread for an Englishman is his becoming a 
rascal:—and co-operation among rascals—if it were 
possible—would bring a curse. Every year sees 
our workmen more eager to do bad work and rob 
their customers on the sly. All political movement 
among such animals I call essentially fermentation 
and putrefaction—not co-operation. Ever affec¬ 
tionately yours, J. Huskin'. — Arrows of the Chace, 
II., pp. 77, 78. 

The cure of a little village near Bellinzona, to 
whom I had expressed wonder that the peasants 
allowed the Ticino to flood their fields, told me that 
they would not join to build an effectual embank¬ 
ment high up the valley, because everybody said 
“that would help his neighbors as much as him¬ 
self.” So every proprietor built a bit of low em¬ 
bankment about his own field; and the Ticino, as 
soon as if had a mind, swept away and swallowed 
all up together.— Unto This Last , p. 7G. 


TRADE. 

The Function of the Merchant in a State.— 
I believe one of the worst symptoms of modern 
society to be, its notion of great inferiority, and 
ungentlemanliness, as necessarily belonging to the 
character of a tradesman. I believe tradesmen 
may be, ought to be—often are—more gentlemen 
than idle and useless people: and I believe that 
art may do noble work by recording in the hall 
of each trade, the services which men belonging 
to that trade have done for their country, both 
preserving the portraits, and recording the import- 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 227 

ant incidents in the lives, of those who made great 
advances in commerce and civilization.— A Joy For 
Ever , p. 78. 

The wonder has always been great to me, that 
heroism has never been supposed to be in anywise 
consistent with the practice of supplying people 
with food, or clothes; but rather with that of quar¬ 
tering oneself upon them for food, and stripping 
them of their clothes. Spoiling of armor is an 
heroic deed in all ages; but the selling of clothes, 
old, or new, has never taken any color of magna¬ 
nimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hun¬ 
gry and clothing the naked should ever become 
base businesses, even when engaged in on a large 
scale. If one could contrive to attach the notion 
of conquest to them anyhow? so that, supposing 
there were anywliere an obstinate race, who re¬ 
fused to be comforted, one might take some pride 
in giving them compulsory comfort; and as it were 
“ occupying a country” with one’s gifts, instead of 
one’s armies ? If one could only consider it as 
much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to get 
an eared field stripped; and contend who should 
build villages, instead of who should “carry” them. 
Are not all forms of heroism conceivable in doing 
these serviceable deeds ? You doubt who is strong¬ 
est ? It might be ascertained by push of spade, as 
well as push of sword. Who is wisest ? There 
are witty things to be thought of in planning other 
business than campaigns. Who is bravest ? There 
are always the elements to fight with, stronger 
than men; and nearly as merciless. The only ab¬ 
solutely and unapproachably heroic element in the 
soldier’s work seems to be—that he is paid little for 
it—and regularly: while you traffickers, and ex¬ 
changers, and others occupied in presumably 
benevolent business, like to be paid much for it— 
and by chance. I never can make out how it is 
that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for 
his trouble, but a pedlar-errant always does;—that 
people are willing to take hard knocks for nothing. 


228 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


but never to sell ribands cheap;—that they are 
ready to go on fervent crusades to recover the tomb 
of a buried God, never on any travels to fulfil the 
orders of a living God;—that they will go anywhere 
barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well 
bribed to practise it, and are perfectly ready to give 
the Gospel gratis, but never the loaves and fishes. 
If you choose to take the matter up on any such 
soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and your 
feeding of nations, for fixed salaries; and to be as 
particular about giving people the best food, and 
the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving them the 
best gunpowder, 1 could carve something for you on 
your exchange worth looking at. But I can only 
at present suggest decorating its frieze with pendant 
purses; and making its pillars broad at the base 
for the sticking of bills .—Crown of Wild Olive , 
Lect. II., pp. 57-59. 

Philosophically, it does not, at first sight, appear 
reasonable (many writers have endeavored to prove 
it unreasonable), that a peaceable and rational 
person, whose trade is buying and selling, should 
be held in less honor than an unpeaceable and 
often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. 
Nevertheless, the consent of mankind has always, 
in spite of the philosophers, given precedence to 
the soldier. 

And this is right. 

For the soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is 
not slaying, but being slain. This, without well 
knowing its own meaning, the world honors it for. 
A bravo’s trade is slaying; but the world has never 
respected bravos more than merchants : the reason 
it honors the soldier is, because he holds his life at 
the service of the State .—Unto This Last , pp. 23, 24. 

The merchant’s function (or manufacturer’s, for 
in the broad sense in which it is here used the word 
must be understood to include both) is to provide 
for the nation. It is no more his function to get 
profit for himself out of that provision than it is a 
clergyman’s function to get his stipend. The sti- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 229 

pend is a due and necessary adjunct, but not the 
object, of his life, if he be a true clergyman, any 
more than his fee (or honorarium) is the object of 
life to a true physician. Neither is his fee the 
object of life to a true merchant. All three, if true 
men, have a work to be done irrespective of fee—to 
be done even at any cost, or for quite the contrary 
of fee; the pastor’s function being to teach, the 
physician’s to heal, and the merchant’s, as I have 
said, to provide. That is to say, he has to under¬ 
stand to their very root the qualities of the thing 
he deals in, and the means of obtaining or produc¬ 
ing it; and he has to apply all his sagacity and 
energy to the producing or obtaining it in perfect 
state, and distributing it at the cheapest possible 
price where it is most needed. 

And because the production or obtaining of any 
commodity involves necessarily the agency of many 
lives and hands, the merchant becomes in the 
course of his business the master and governor of 
large masses of men in a more direct, though less 
confessed way, than a military officer or pastor; 
so that on him falls, in great part, the responsibil¬ 
ity for the kind of life they lead : and it becomes 
his duty, not only to be always considering how 
to produce what he sells in the purest and cheapest 
forms, but how to make the various employments 
involved in the production, or transference of it, 
most beneficial to the men employed. . . . 

Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right, 
or were by any chance obliged, to place his own 
son in the position of a common sailor; as he would 
then treat his son, he is bound always to treat every 
one of the men under him. So, also, supposing 
the master of a manufactory saw it right, or were 
by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the 
position of an ordinary workman; as he would 
then treat his son, he is bound always to treat 
every one of his men. This is the only effective, 
true, or practical Rule which can be given on this 
point of political economy. 

And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last 



230 


A BUSKIN' ANTHOLOGY. 


man to leave his ship in case of wreck, and to share 
his last crust with the sailors in case of famine, so 
the manufacturer, in any commercial crisis or dis¬ 
tress, is bound to take the suffering of it with his 
men, and even to take more of it for himself than 
he allows his men to feel; as a father would in a 
famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for 
his son. 

All which sounds very strange ; the only real 
strangeness in the matter being, nevertheless, that 
it should so sound. For all this is true, and that 
not partially nor theoretically, but everlastingly 
and practically .—Unto This Last , p. 28. 

People will find that commerce is an occupation 
which gentlemen will every day see more need to 
engage in, rather than in the businesses of talking 
to men, or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as 
in true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary 
to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss;— 
that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, under 
a sense of duty; that the market may have its 
martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its 
heroisms as well as war .—Unto This Last , p. 25. 

Considering the materials dealt with, and the 
crude state of art knowledge at the time, I do not 
know that any more wide or effective influence in 
public taste was ever exercised than that of the 
Staffordshire manufacture of pottery under William 
Wedgwood, and it only rests with the manufacturer 
in every other business to determine whether he 
will, in like manner, make his wares educational 
instruments, or mere drugs of the market. You all 
should be, in a certain sense, authors: you must, 
indeed, first catch the public eye, as an author 
must the public ear; but once gain your audience, 
or observance, and as it is in the writer’s power 
thenceforward to publish what will educate as it 
amuses—so it is in yours to publish what will edu¬ 
cate as it adorns .—The Two Paths , p. 7G. 

The Making and Selling of bad Goods.—M y 
neighbor sells me bad meat: I sell him in return 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 231 

flawed iron. We neither of us get one atom of pe¬ 
cuniary advantage on the whole transaction, but 
we both suffer unexpected inconvenience; my men 
get scurvy, and his cattle-truck runs off the rails.— 
Munera Pulveris, p. 87. 

You drive a gambler out of the gambling-room 
who loads dice, but you leave a tradesmen in flour¬ 
ishing business, who loads scales ! For observe, all 
dishonest dealing is loading scales. What does it 
matter whether I get short weight, adulterate sub¬ 
stance, or dishonest fabric ? The fault in the fabric 
is incomparably the worst of the two.— Crown of 
Wild Olive , Lect. II., p. 37. 

No form of theft is so criminal as this—none so 
deadly to the State. If you break into a man’s 
house and steal a hundred pounds’ worth of plate, 
he knows his loss, and there is an end (besides that 
you take your risk of punishment for your gain, 
like a man). And if you do it bravely and openly, 
and habitually live by such inroad, you may retain 
nearly every moral and manly virtue, and become 
a heroic rider and reiver, and hero of song. But if 
you swindle me out of twenty shillings’-worth of 
quality, on each of a hundred bargains, I lose my 
hundred pounds all the same, and I get a hundred 
untrustworthy articles besides, which will fail me 
and injure me in all manner of ways, when 1 least 
expect it; and you, having done your thieving 
basely, are corrupted by the guilt of it to the very 
heart’s core. 

This is the first thing, therefore, which your gen¬ 
eral laws must be set to punish, fiercely, immiti- 
gably, to the utter prevention and extinction of it, 
or there is no hope for you. No religion that ever 
was preached on this earth of God’s rounding, ever 
proclaimed any salvation to sellers of bad goods. . . . 
For light weights and false measures, or for proved 
adulteration or dishonest manufacture of article, 
the penalty should be simply confiscation of goods 
and sending out of the country. The kind of person 
who desires prosperity by such practices, could not 


232 


A R US KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


be made to “emigrate” too speedily.— Time and 
Tide, pp. 57, 58. 

No such Thing as a just Cheapness.— There is 
no such thing as a just or real cheapness. . . . 
When you obtain anything yourself for half-price, 
somebody else must always have paid the other 
half .—Art of England, p. 72. 

Whenever we buy, or try to buy, cheap goods— 
goods offered at a price which we know cannot be 
remunerative for the labor involved in them, we 
are stealing somebody’s labor. Don’t let us mince 
the matter. I say, in plain Saxon, Stealing— 
taking from him the proper reward of his work, 
and putting it into our own pocket. You know 
well enough that the thing could not have been 
offered you at that price, unless distress of some 
kind had forced the producer to part with it. Y r ou 
take advantage of this distress, and you force as 
much out of him as you can under the circum¬ 
stances. The old barons of the middle ages used, 
in general, the thumb-screw, to extort property; 
we moderns use, in preference, hunger or domestic 
affliction: but the fact of extortion remains pre¬ 
cisely the same. Whether we force the man’s 
property from him by pinching his stomach, or 
pinching his fingers, makes some difference ana¬ 
tomically;—morally, none whatsoever: we use a 
form of torture of some sort in order to make him 
give up his property; we use, indeed, the man’s own 
anxieties, instead of the rack; and his immediate 
peril of starvation, instead of the pistol at the head; 
but otherwise we differ from Front-de-Bceuf, or 
Dick Turpin, merely in being less dexterous, more 
cowardly, and more cruel .—The Two Paths, p. 127. 

Trade as it is, and Trade as it should be.— It 
is very curious to watch the efforts of two shop¬ 
keepers to ruin each other, neither having the least 
idea that his ruined neighbor must eventually be 
supported at his own expense, with an increase of 
poor rates; and thab the contest between them is 
not in reality which shall get everything for him- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 233 

self, but which shall first take upon himself and his 
customers the gratuitous maintenance of the other’s 
family .— A Joy For Ever , p. 90. 

Sin sticks so fast between the joinings of the 
stones of buying and selling, that “ to trade ” in 
things, or literally “cross-give” them, has warped 
itself, by the instinct of nations, into their worst 
word for fraud; and “trader,” “traditor,” and 
“traitor” are but the same word. For which 
simplicity of language there is more reason than 
at first appears : for as in true commerce there is 
no “profit,” so in true commerce there is no “sale.” 
The idea of sale is that of an interchange between 
enemies respectively endeavoring to get the better 
one of another; but commerce is an exchange be¬ 
tween friends; and there is no desire but that it 
should be just, any more than there would be 
between members of the same family.— Munera 
Pulveris , pp. 81, 82. 

Middlemen in Trade.— Here’s my publisher, 
gets tenpence a dozen for his cabbages; the con¬ 
sumer pays threepence each. That is to say, you 
pay for three cabbages and a half, and the middle¬ 
man keeps two and a half for himself, and gives 
you one. 

Suppose you saw this financial gentleman, in 
bodily presence, toll-taking at your door—that 
you bought three loaves, and saw him pocket two, 
and pick the best crust off the third as he handed 
it in;—that you paid for a pot of beer, and saw him 
drink two-thirds of it, and hand you over the pot 
and sops—would you long ask, then, what was to 
become of him?— Fors, III., p. 369. 

Pay as you go. —In all wise commerce, payment, 
large or small, should be over the counter. If you 
can’t pay for a thing, don’t buy it. If you can’t 
get paid for it, don’t sell it. So, you will have calm 
days, drowsy nights, all the good business you have 
now, and none of the bad.— Fors, I., p. 362. 

Free Trade. —The distances of nations are meas¬ 
ured, not by seas, but by ignorances; and their 


23± 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


divisions determined, not by dialects, but by enmi¬ 
ties .—Munera Pulveris , p. 79. 

It will be observed that I do not admit even the 
idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they like, 
keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw 
its own open. It is not the opening them, but a 
sudden, inconsiderate, and blunderingly experi¬ 
mental manner of opening them, which does the 
harm. If you have been protecting a manufacture 
for long series of years, you must not take protec¬ 
tion off in a moment, so as throw every one of its 
operatives at once out of employ, any more than 
you must take all its wrappings off a feeble child at 
once in cold weather, though the cumber of them 
may have been radically inj uring its health. Little 
by little, you must restore it to freedom and to air. 
. . . When trade is entirely free, no country can 
be competed with in the articles for the production 
of which it is naturally calculated; nor can it com¬ 
pete with any other in the production of articles 
for which it is not naturally calculated. Tuscany, 
for instance, cannot compete with England in steel, 
nor England with Tuscany in oil. They must ex¬ 
change their steel and oil. Which exchange should 
be as frank and free as honesty and the sea-winds 
can make it. Competition, indeed, arises at first, 
and sharply, in order to prove which is strongest in 
any given manufacture possible to both; this point 
once ascertained, competition is at an end .—TJnto 
This Last , pp. 56, 57. 

Exchange. —There are in the main two great 
fallacies which the rascals of the world rejoice in 
making its fools proclaim : The first, that by con¬ 
tinually exchanging, and cheating each other on 
exchange, two exchanging persons, out of one pot, 
alternating with one kettle, can make their two 
fortunes. That is the principle of Trade . The 
second, that Judas’s bag has become a juggler’s, in 
which, if Mr. P. deposits his pot, and waits awhile, 
there will come out two pots, both full of broth; 
and if Mr. K. deposits his kettle, and waits awhile, 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 235 


there will come out two kettles, both full of fish! 
That is the principle of Interest. — Fors, II., p. 267. 

One man, by sowing and reaping, turns one 
measure of corn into two measures. That is Profit. 
Another by digging and forging, turns one spade 
into two spades. That is Profit. But the man who 
has two measures of corn wants sometimes to dig; 
and the man who has two spades wants sometimes 
to eat:—They exchange the gained grain for the 
gained tool; and both are the better for the ex¬ 
change; but though there is much advantage in 
the transaction, there is no Profit. Nothing is con¬ 
structed or produced. . . . Profit, or material gain, 
is attainable only by construction or by discovery; 
not by exchange. Whenever material gain follows 
exchange, for every plus there is a precisely equal 
minus. 

Unhappily for the progress of the science of Politi¬ 
cal Economy, the plus quantities, or—if I may be al¬ 
lowed to coin an awkward plural—the pluses, make 
a very positive and venerable appearance in the 
world, so that every one is eager to learn the science 
which produces results so magnificent, whereas the 
minuses have, on the other hand, a tendency to re¬ 
tire into back streets, and other places of shade,— 
or even to get themselves wholly and finally put 
out of sight in graves : which renders the algebra 
of this science peculiar, and difficultly legible : a 
large number of its negative signs being written by 
the account-keeper in a kind of red ink, Which 
starvation thins, and makes strangely pale, or even 
quite invisible ink, for the present.— Unto This Last, 
pp. 71, 72. 

Definition of Property.— A man’s “Property,” 
the possession “proper” to him, his own, rightly 
so called, and no one else’s on any pretence of theirs 
—consists of“(A) The good things, (B) Which he 
has honestly got, (C) And can skilfully use.—That 
is the A B C of Property.— Fors, HI., p. 309. 

The Spending, or Consumption of Wealth.— 
It is because of this (among many other such errors) 


230 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


that I have fearlessly declared your so-called 
science of Political Economy to be no science; be¬ 
cause, namely, it has omitted the study of exactly 
the most important branch of the business—the 
study of spending. For spend you must, and as 
much as you make, ultimately. You gather corn :— 
will you bury England under a heap of grain; or 
will you, when you have gathered, finally eat ? 
You gather gold :—will you make your house-roofs 
of it, or pave your streets with it ?—Grown of 
Wild Olive , Lect. II., p. 60. 

There is not one person in a million who knows 
what a “ million ” means; and that is one reason 
the nation is always ready to let its ministers spend 
a million or two in cannon, if they can show they 
have saved twopence-halfpenny in tape.— Eagle's 
Nest, p. 22. 

A certain quantity of the food produced by the 
country is paid annually by it into the squire’s 
hand, in the forih of rent, privately, and taxes, 
publicly. If he uses this food to support a food- 
producing population, he increases daily the 
strength of the country and his o\vn; but if he uses 
if to support an idle population, or one producing 
merely trinkets in iron, or gold, or other rubbish, 
he steadily weakens the country, and debases him¬ 
self.— Fors, II. j p. 243. 

Unnecessary Luxury is Waste.— If a school¬ 
boy goes out in the morning with five shillings in 
his pocket, and comes home at night penniless 
(having spent his all in tarts), principal and interest 
are gone, and fruiterer and baker are enriched. So 
far so good. But suppose the schoolboy, instead, 
has bought a book and a knife; principal and in¬ 
terest are gone, and bookseller and cutler are en¬ 
riched. But the schoolboy is enriched also, and 
may help his schoolfellows next day with knife and 
book, instead of lying in bed and incurring a debt 
to the doctor .—A Joy For Ever, p. 103. 

The beggared Millionaire.— The spending of 
the fortune in extravagance, has taken a certain 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 237 


number of years (suppose ten), and during that 
time 1,000,000 dollars worth of work has been done 
by the people, who have been paid that sum for it. 
Where is the product of that work ? By your own 
statement, wholly consumed; for the man for whom 
it has been done is now a beggar. You have given 
therefore, as a nation, 1,000,000 dollars worth of 
work, and ten years of time, and you have pro¬ 
duced, as ultimate result, one beggar! Excellent 
economy, gentlemen; and sure to conduce, in due 
sequence, to the production of more than one beg¬ 
gar.— A Joy For Ever, p. 102. 

The Expenditures of the Rich.— When Mr. 
Greg so pleasantly showed in the Contemporary 
Review how benevolent the rich were in drinking 
champagne, [on the (false) theory that expediture 
of money for luxuries is a help to the poor: in 
reality (says Ruskin), the nation is so much the 
poorer for every penny spent in indulgence of use¬ 
less luxury,] and how wicked the poor w r ere in drink¬ 
ing beer, you will find that in Fors of vol. iii, p. 85, 
I requested him to supply the point of economical 
information which he had inadvertently overlooked 
—how the champagne-drinker had got his cham¬ 
pagne. The poor man, drunk in an ungraceful 
manner though he be, has yet worked for his beer— 
and does but drink his wages. I asked, of course, 
for complete parallel of the two cases—what work 
the rich man had done for his sparkling beer; and 
how it came to pass that he had got so much higher 
wages, that he could put them, unblamed, to that 
benevolent use. To which question, you observe, 
Mr. Greg has never ventured the slightest answer. 
— Fors, IV., p. 49. 

Wise Consumption the difficult Thing.— 
Consumption absolute is the end, crown, and per¬ 
fection of production; and wise consumption is a 
far more difficult art than wise production. Twen¬ 
ty people can gain money for one who can use it; 
and the vital question, for individual and for 
nation, is, never “how much do they make? ” but 




238 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY . 


“ to what purpose do they spend ? ”—Unto This 
Last , p. 77. 

The final object of political economy is to get 
good method of consumption, and great quantity 
of consumption: in other words, to use everything, 

and to use it nobly.It matters, so far as 

the laborer's immediate profit is concerned, not an 
iron filing whether I employ him in growing a 
peach, or forging a bombshell; but my probable 
mode of consumption of those articles matters seri¬ 
ously. Admit that it is to be in both cases “ un¬ 
selfish,” and the difference, to him, is final, whether 
when his child is ill I walk into his cottage and 
give it the peach, or drop the shell down his 
chimney, and blow his roof off .—Unto This Last , 

pp. 80, 82. 



LAND. 


There are two theories on the subject of land now 
abroad, and in contention; both false: 

The first is that by Heavenly law, there have 
always existed, and must continue to exist, a cer¬ 
tain number of hereditarily sacred persons, to whom 
the earth, air, and water of the world belong, as 
personal property; of which earth, air and water 
these persons may, at their pleasure, permit, or for¬ 
bid the rest of the human race to eat, breathe, or to 
drink. This theory is not for many years longer 
tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of 
the land of the world among the mob of the world 
would immediately elevate the said mob into sacred 
personages; that houses would then build them¬ 
selves, and corn grow of itself; and that everybody 
would be able to live without doing any work for 
his living. This theory would also be found highly 
untenable in practice .—Sesame and Lilies, p. 51. 

Possession of land implies the duty of living on 
it, and by it, if there is enough to live on; then, 
having got one’s own life from it by one’s own 




SOCIAL PHILO SOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 239 


labor or wise superintendence of labor, if there is 
more land than is enough for one’s self, the duty 
of making it fruitful and beautiful for as many 
more as can live on it.— Fors, IV., p. 378. 

Rext.—R ent is an exaction, by force of hand, for 
the maintenance of squires.— Fors , II., p. 220. 

The rents of our lands [in Utopia], though they 
Will be required from the tenantry as strictly as 
those of any other estates, will differ from common 
rents primarily in being lowered, instead of raised, 
in proportion to every improvement made by the 
tenant; secondly, in that they will be entirely used 
for the benefit of the tenantry themselves, or better 
culture of the estates, no money being ever taken 
by the landlords unless they earn it by their own 
personal labor.— Fors , III., p. 41. 

You lease ybur tenants an orchard of crab-trees 
for so much a year; they leave you, at the end of 
the lease, an orchard of golden pippins. Supposing 
they have paid you their rent regularly, you have 
no right to anything more than what you lent 
them—crab-trees, to wit; You must pay them for 
the better trees which by their good industry they 
give you back, or, which is the same thing, previ¬ 
ously reduce their rent in proportion to the im¬ 
provement in apples. “The exact contrary,” you 
observe, “of your present modes of proceeding.” 
Just so, gentlemen; and it is not improbable that 
the exact contrary in many other cases of your 
present modes of proceeding will be found by you, 
eventually, the proper one, and more than that, the 
necessary one.— Fors, II., p. 262. 

The most wretched houses of the poor in London 
often pay ten or fifteen per cent, to the landlord; 
and I have known an instance of sanitary legisla¬ 
tion being hindered, to the loss of many hundreds 
of lives, in order that the rents of a nobleman, 
derived from the necessities of the poor, might not 
be diminished. ... I felt this evil so strongly that 
I bought, in the worst part of London, one freehold 


240 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


and one leasehold property, consisting of houses 
inhabited by the lowest poor; in order to try what 
change in their comfort and habits I could effect 
by taking only a just rent, but that firmly. The 
houses of the leasehold pay me five per cent.; the 
families that used to have one room in them have 
now two; and are more orderly and hopeful besides; 
and there is a surplus still on the rents they pay, 
after I have taken my five per cent., with which, 
if all goes well, they will eventually be able to buy 
twelve years of the lease from me. The freehold 
pays three per cent., with similar results in the 
comfort of the tenant. This is merely an example 
of what might be done by firm State action in such 
matters .—Time and Tide , p. 99. 

Railroads. —Going by railroad I do not consider 
as travelling at all; it is merely “being sent” to a 
place, and very little different from becoming a 
parcel; the next step to it would of course be tele¬ 
graphic transport, of which, however, I suppose it 
has been truly said by Octave Feuillet, 

“ II y aurait des gens asscz bites pour trouver 9a amusant.” 

A man who really loves travelling would as soon 
consent to pack a day of happiness into an hour of 
railroad, as one who loved eating would agree, if 
it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a 
pill .—Modern Painters , III., pp. 319, 320. 

A Railway Traveller.—A person carried in an 
iron box by a kettle on wheels. — Fors, II., p. 102. 

Ruskin’s personal Use of Railroads.— My cor¬ 
respondent doubts the sincerity of my abuse of 
railroads because she suspects I use them. I do so 
constantly, my dear lady; few men more. I use 
everything that comes within reach of me. If the 
devil were standing at my side at this moment, I 
should endeavor to make some use of him as a 
local black. The wisdom of life is in preventing 
all the evil we can; and using what is inevitable, 
to the best purpose. I use my sicknesses, for the 
work I despise in health; my enemies, for study of 
the philosophy of benediction and malediction; 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 241 


and railroads, for whatever I find of help in them 
—looking always hopefully forward to the day 
when their embankments will be ploughed down 
again, like the camps of Rome, into our English 
fields. But I am perfectly ready even to construct 
a railroad, when i think one necessary; and in the 
opening chapter of Munera Pulveris my correspon¬ 
dent will find many proper uses for steam-machin¬ 
ery specified. What is required of the members of 
St. George’s Company is, not that they should 
never travel by railroads, nor that they should 
abjure machinery; but that they should never 
travel unnecessarily, or in wanton liaste; and that 
they should never do with a machine what can be 
done with hands and arms, while hands and arms 
are idle.— Fors, II., p. 333. 

From Coniston to Ulverstone.— The town of 
Ulverstone is twelve miles from me, by four miles 
of mountain road beside Coniston lake, three 
through a pastoral valley, five by the seaside. A 
healthier or lovelier walk would be difficult to find. 

In old times, if a Coniston peasant had any busi¬ 
ness at Ulverstone, he walked to Ulverstone; spent 
nothing but shoe-leather on the road, drank at the 
streams, and if he spent a couple of batz when he 
got to Ulverstone, “ it was the end of the world.” 
But now, he would never think of doing such a 
thing! He first walks three miles in a contrary 
direction, to a railroad station, and then travels by 
railroad twenty-four miles to Ulverstone, paying 
two shillings fare. During the twenty-four miles 
transit, he is idle, dusty, stupid; and either more 
hot or cold than is pleasant to him. In either case 
he drinks beer at two or three of the stations, passes 
his time, between them, with anybody he can find, 
in talking without having anything to talk of; and 
such talk always becomes vicious. He arrives at 
Ulverstone, jaded, half drunk, and otherwise de¬ 
moralized, and three shillings, at least, poorer than 
in the morning. Of that sum, a shilling has gone 
for beer, threepence to a railway shareholder, 


242 


A IiUSKIN ANTHOLOGY . 


threepence in coals, and eighteenpence lias been 
spent in employing strong men in the vile mechani¬ 
cal work of making and driving a machine, instead 
of his own legs, to carry the drunken lout. The 
results, absolute loss and demoralization to the 
poor, on all sides, and iniquitous gain to the rich. 
Fancy, if you saw the railway officials actually em¬ 
ployed in carrying the countryman bodily on their 
backs to Ulverstone, what you would think of the 
business ! And because they waste ever so much 
iron and fuel besides to do it, you think it a profita¬ 
ble one \—Fors, II., p. 238. 

Let the Nation own its Railroads.— Neither 
road, nor railroad, nor canal should ever pay divi¬ 
dends to anybody. They should pay their working 
expenses and no more. All dividends are simply a 
tax on the traveller and the goods, levied by the 
person to whom the road or canal belongs, for the 
right of passing over his property. And this right 
should at once be purchased by the nation, and the 
original cost of the roadway—be it of gravel, iron, 
or adamant—at once defrayed by the nation, and 
then the whole work of the carriage of persons or 
goods done for ascertained prices, by salaried offi¬ 
cers, as the carriage of letters is done now. 

I believe, if the votes of the proprietors of all 
the railroads in the kingdom were taken en masse , 
it would be found that the majority would gladly 
receive back their original capital, and cede their 
right of “ revising ” prices of railway tickets. And 
if railway property is a good and wise investment 
of capital, the public need not shrink from taking 
the whole off their hands. Let the public take it. 
(I, for one, who never held a rag of railroad scrip 
in my life, nor ever willingly travelled behind an 
engine where a horse could pull me, will most gladly 
subscribe my proper share for such purchase ac¬ 
cording to my income.) Then let them examine 
what lines pay their working expenses and what 
lines do not, and boldly leave the unpaying embank¬ 
ments to be white over with sheep, like Roman 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 243 


camps, take up the working lines on sound prin¬ 
ciples, pay tlieir drivers and pointsmen well, keep 
their carriages clean and in good repair, and make 
it as wonderful a thing for a train, as for an old 
mail-coach, to be behind its time; and the sagacious 
British public will very soon find its pocket heav¬ 
ier, its heart lighter, and its “ passages ” pleasanter 
than any of the three have been for many a day.— 
Arrows of the Chace, II., p. 82. 

A railroad company is merely an association of 
turnpike-keepers, who make the tolls as high as 
they can, not to mend the roads with, but the 
pocket. The public will in time discover this, and 
do away with turnpikes on railroads, as on all 
other public-ways — Munera Pulveris, p. IOC. 


MACHINERY. 

A spider may perhaps be rationally proud of his 
own cobweb, even though all the fields in the 
morning are covered with the like, for he made it 
himself—but suppose a machine spun it for him ?— 
A Joy For Ever, p. 129. 

“ Hark,” says an old Athenian, according to Aris¬ 
tophanes, “ how the nightingale has filled the thick¬ 
ets with honey ” (meaning, with music as sweet). 
In Yorkshire, your steam-nightingales fill the woods 
with—Buzz; and for four miles round are audible, 
summoning you—to your pleasure, I suppose, my 
free-born 1—Fors, I., p. 399. 

Modern Utopianism imagines that the world is to 
be stubbed by steam, and human arms and legs to 
be eternally idle; not perceiving that thus it would 
reduce man to the level of his cattle indeed, who 
can only graze and gore, but not dig ! It is indeed 
certain that advancing knowledge will guide us to 
less painful methods of human toil; but in the true 
Utopia, man will rather harness himself, with his 
oxen, to his plough, than leave the devil to drive 
it.— Fors, IV., p. 381. 



244 


A II US KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


As all noble sight is with the eyes that God has 
given you, so all noble motion is with the limbs 
God has balanced for you, and all noble strength 
with the arms He has knit. Though you should 
put electric coils into your high heels, and make 
spring-heeled Jacks and Gills of yourselves, you 
will never dance, so, as you could barefoot. Though 
you could have machines that would swing a ship 
of war into the sea, and drive a railway train 
through a rock, all divine strength is still the 
strength of Ilerakles, a man’s wrestle, and a man’s 
blow .—Art of England, p. G8. 

If all the steam engines in England, and all the 
coal in it, with all their horse and ass power put 
together, could produce—so much as one grain of 
corn !— Fors, II., p. 238. 

The use of such machinery as mowing implements 
involves the destruction of all pleasures in rural 
labor; and I doubt not, in that destruction, the 
essential deterioration of the national mind.— 
Modern Painters, V., p. 162. 

The use of machinery in art destroys the national 
intellect; and, finally, renders all luxury impossi¬ 
ble. All machinery needful in ordinary life to 
supplement human or animal labor may be moved 
by wind or water; while steam, or any mode of 
heat power, may only be employed justifiably under 
extreme or special conditions of need; as for speed 
on main lines of communication, and for raising 
water from great depths, or other such work beyond 
human strength.— Fors, III., p. 250. 


WAR. 

Pro.—The vice and injustice of the world are 
constantly springing anew, and are only to be sub¬ 
dued by battle; the keepers of order and law must 
always be soldiers.— Athena , p. 88. 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 245 

The game of war is only that in which the full 
personal power of the human creature is brought 
out in management of its weapons. . . . The great 
justification of this game is that it truly, when well 
played, determines who is the best man; —who is the 
highest bred, the most self-denying, the most fear¬ 
less, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and 
hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, un¬ 
less there is a clear possibility of the struggle’s end¬ 
ing in death.— Grown of Wild Olive , p. 75. 

The creative or foundational war is that in which 
the natural restlessness and love of contest among 
men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of 
beautiful—though it may be fatal—play : in which 
the natural ambition and love of power of men are 
disciplined into the aggressive conquest of sur¬ 
rounding evil: and in which the natural instincts 
of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the 
institutions, and purity of the households, which 
they are appointed to defend.— Crown of Wild Olive , 
p. 70. 

Those who can nevermore see sunrise, nor watch 
the climbing light gild the Eastern clouds, without 
thinking what graves it has gilded, first, far down 
behind the dark earth-line,—who never more shall 
see the crocus bloom in spring, without thinking 
what dust it is that feeds the wild flowers of Bala¬ 
clava. Ask their witness, and see if they will not 
reply that it is well with them, and with theirs; that 
they would have it no otherwise; would not, if they 
might, receive back their gifts of love and life, nor 
take again the purple of their blood out of the 
cross on the breastplate of England. Ask them : 
and though they should answer only with a sob, 
listen if it does not gather upon their lips into the 
sound of the old Seyton war-cry—“ Set on.”— Mod¬ 
ern Painters , III., p. 355. 

All healthy men like fighting, and like the sense 
of danger; all brave women like to hear of their 
fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed 
instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help 



246 


A RUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


fancying that fair fight is the best play for them; 
and that a tournament was a better game than a 
steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in 
France as well as here, for universal hurdle-races 
and cricketing: but I do not think universal 
“ crickets” will bring out the best qualities of the 
nobles of either country. I use, in such question, 
the test which I have adopted, of the connection of 
war with other arts; and I reflect how, as a sculp¬ 
tor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a monu¬ 
ment for a dead knight, in Westminster abbey, 
with a carving of a bat at one end, and a ball at 
the other. It may be the remains in me only of 
savage Gothic prejudice; but I had rather carve it 
with a shield at one end, and a sword at the other. 
—Grown of Wild Olive , p. 74. 

War is the foundation of all the arts, and it is 
the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties 
of men. 

. It was very strange to me to discover this; and 
very dreadful—but I saw it to be quite an undenia¬ 
ble fact. The common notion that peace and the 
virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to 
be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of civil 
life only flourish together. We talk of peace and 
learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and 
civilization; but I found that those were not the 
words which the Muse of History coupled together: 
that on her lips, the words were—peace and sensu¬ 
ality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, 
peace and death .—Crown of Wild Olive , p. 70. 

All the pure and noble arts of peace are founded 
on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but 
among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among 
a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is 
no art among an agricultural people, if it remains 
at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine 
art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only 
is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys 
whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art 
possible to a nation but that which is based on 
battle .—Crown of Wild Olive , Lect. III., p. GC. 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPIIY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 247 

Contra. —I, for one, would fain join in the cadence 
of hammer-strokes that should beat swords into 
plough-shares.— Crown of Wild Olive , Lect. 111., 
p. 93. 

The real, final, reason for all the poverty, misery, 
and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply 
that you women, however good, however religious, 
however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, 
are too selfish and too thoughtless to take pains 
for any creature out of your own immediate circles. 
You fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. 
Now I just tell you this, that if the usual course of 
war, instead of unroofing peasants’ houses, and 
ravaging peasants’ fields, merely broke the china 
upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in 
civilized countries would last a week. . . . Let 
every lady in the upper classes of civilized Europe 
simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she 
will wear black; —a mute's black—with no jewel, 
no ornament, no excuse for, or evasion into, pretti¬ 
ness.—I tell you again, no war would last a week. 
—Crown of Wild Olive , Lect. III., p. 93. 

The first reason for all wars, and for the necessity 
of national defences, is that the majority of persons, 
high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, 
and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbors’ 
goods, land, and fame. 

But besides being Thieves, they are also fools, 
and have never yet been able to understand that if 
Cornish men want pippins cheap, they must not 
ravage Devonshire.— Fors , I., p. 9G. 

“To dress it and to keep it.”—That, then, was 
to be our work. Alas! what work have we set 
ourselves upon instead! How have we ravaged 
the garden instead of kept it—feeding our war- 
horses with i^s flowers, and splintering its trees 
into spear-shafts !— Modern Painters, V-, p. 15. 

There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the 
perfectness of the Earth’s beauty, by reason of the 
passions of men, in that picture of Paul Uccello’s 
of the battle of Sant’ Egidio, in which the armies 


A IiUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


248 


meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild 
roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the hel¬ 
mets, and glowing between the lowered lances. 
For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone 
hitherto for man between the tossing of helmet- 
crests; and sometimes I cannot but think of the 
trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, 
in that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their 
innocent leaves in the warm spring-time, in vain 
for men; and all along the dells of England her 
beeches cast their dappled shade only where the 
outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless 
chase; and by the sweet French rivers their long 
ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only to show 
the flames of burning cities, on the horizon, through 
the tracery of their stems: amidst the fair defiles 
of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid the 
ambushes of treachery; and on their valley mead¬ 
ows, day by day, the lilies which were white at the 
dawn were washed with crimson at sunset .—Modern 
Painters, V., p. 19. 

No youth who was earnestly busy with any 
peaceful subject of study, or set on any serviceable 
course of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier. 
Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or 
business, in science or in literature, and he will 
never think of war otherwise than as a calamity. 
But leave him idle; and the more brave and active 
and capable he is by nature, the more he will thirst 
for some appointed field for action; and find, in the 
passion and peril of battle, the only satisfying ful¬ 
filment of his unoccupied being .—Crown of Wild 
Olive, p. 71. 


MODERN WARFARE. 

If we could trace the innermost of all causes of 
modern war, I believe it would be found, not in the 
avarice nor ambition of nations, but in the mere 
idleness of the upper classes. They have nothing 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC C'ANONS. 2fi> 


to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other. 
—Munera Pulveris, p. 121. 

The ingenuity of our inventors is far from being 
exhausted, and in a few years more we may be able 
to destroy a regiment round a corner, and bombard 
a fleet over the horizon .—Arrows of the Chace, III., 
p. 41. 

It is one very awful form of the operation of 
wealth in Europe that it is entirely capitalists’ 
wealth which supports unjust wars. Just wars do 
not need so much money to support them; for most 
of the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but 
for an unjust war, men’s bodies and souls have both 
to be bought; and the best tools of war for them 
besides; which makes such war costly to the maxi¬ 
mum .—Unto This Last, p. 82. 

Tho Americans, in their war of 18G0-65, sent all 
their best and honestest youths, Harvard University 
men and the like, to that accursed war; got them 
nearly all shot; wrote pretty biographies (to the ages 
of 17, 18, 19) and epitaphs for them; and so,having 
washed all the salt out of the nation in blood, left 
themselves to putrefaction, and the morality of 
New York .—Mnnera Pulveris, p. 102. 

If you have to take away masses of men from all 
industrial employment—to feed them by the labor 
of others—to move them and provide them with de¬ 
structive machines, varied daily in national rival- 
ship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the 
country which you attack,—to destroy for a score 
of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and 
its harbors;—and if, finally, having brought masses 
of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to 
face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged 
shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures 
countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve 
and parch, through days of torture, down into clots 
of clay—what book of accounts shall record the 
cost of your work;—What book of judgment sen¬ 
tence the guilt of it ? 

That, I say, is modern war—scientific war—chem- 


250 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


ical and mechanic war, worse even than the sav¬ 
age’s poisoned arrow .—Grown of Wild Olive , p. 76. 

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other king¬ 
dom, choose to make your pastime of contest, do 
so, and welcome; but set not up these unhappy 
peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the 
wager is to be of death, lay it on your own heads, 
not theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, 
though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will 
look upon, and be with you in; but they will not 
be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphi¬ 
theatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, 
whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant mil¬ 
lions into gladiatorial war .—Grown of Wild Olive , 
p. 72. 

The game of war is entrancingly pleasant to the 
imagination; the facts of it, not always so pleasant. 
We dress for it, however, more finely than for any 
other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, 
as to hunt, but in scarlet and gold, and all manner 
of fine colors : of course we could fight better in 
grey, and without feathers; but all nations have 
agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. 
Then the bats and balls are very costly; our English 
and French bats, with the balls and wickets, even 
those which we don’t make any use of, costing, I 
suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annu¬ 
ally to each nation; all of which, you know, is paid 
for by hard laborer’s work in the furrow and fur¬ 
nace. A costly game !—not to speak of its conse¬ 
quences .—Grown of Wild Olives , Lect. I., p. 23. 

Suppose I had been sent for by some private 
gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his 
garden separated by a fruit-wall from his next door 
neighbor’s; and he had called me to consult with 
him on the furnishing of his drawing room. I 
begin looking about me, and find the walls rather 
bare; I think such and such a paper might be 
desirable—perhaps a little fresco here and there 
on the ceiling—a damask curtain or so at the 
windows. “ Ah,” sa,ys my employer, “ damask cur- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 251 

tains, indeed ! That’s all very fine, but you know 
I can’t afford that kind of thing just now ! ” “ Yet 

the world credits you with a splendid income ! ’* 
“ Ah, yes,” says my friend, “ but do you know, at 
present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel- 
traps?” “ Steel-traps ! for whom ? ” “ Why, for that 
fellow on the other side of the wall, you know : we’re 
very good friends, capital friends; but we are obliged 
to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we 
could not possibly keep on friendly terms without 
them, and our spring guns. The worst of it is, we 
are both clever fellows enough; and there’s never a 
day passes that we don’t find out a new trap, or a 
new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about 
fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it all 
together; and I don’t see how we’re to do it with 
less.” A highly comic state of life for two private 
gentlemen ! but for two nations, it seems to me, not 
wholly comic ? Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, 
if there were only one mad man in it; and your 
Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only 
one clown in it; but when the whole world turns 
clown, and paints itself red with its own heart’s 
blood instead of vermilion, it is something else 
than comic, I think .—Crown of Wild Olive , Lect. 
II., p. 48. 

Observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to 
foreign military governments, and how strange it 
is. If your little boy came to you to ask for money 
to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think 
twice before you gave it him; and you would have 
some idea that it was wasted, when you saw 
it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mis¬ 
chief with it. But the Russian children, and Aus¬ 
trian children, come to you, borrowing money, not 
to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and 
bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep 
down all noble life in Italy with; and to murder 
Polish women and children with; and that you will 
give at once, because they pay you interest for it. 
Now, in order to pay you that interest, they must 


A llUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


252 

tax every working’ peasant in their dominions; and 
on that work you live. You therefore at once rob 
the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the 
Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the 
theft, and the bribe for the assassination ! That is 
the broad fact—that is the practical meaning of 
your foreign loans, and of most large interest of 
money; and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, 
forsooth, as if he denied the Bible, and you believed 
it! though, wretches as you are, every deliberate 
act of your lives is a new defiance of its primary 
orders; and as if, for most of the rich men of Eng¬ 
land at this moment, it were not indeed to be de¬ 
sired, as the best thing at least for them , that the 
Bible should not be true, since against them these 
words are written in it: “ The rust of your gold 

and silver shall be a witness against you, and shall 
eat your flesh, as it were fire .”—Grown of Wild Olive, 
Lect. I., p. 29. 

The Attitude of England toward Italy and 
Poland in 1859 and 1863.—What these matters have 
to do with Art may not at first be clear, but I can 
perhaps make it so by a short similitude. Suppose 
I had been engaged by an English gentleman to 
give lectures on Art to his son. Matters at first go 
smoothly, and I am diligent in my definitions of 
line and color, until, on Sunday morning, at break¬ 
fast time, a ticket-of-leave man takes a fancy to 
murder a girl in the road leading round the lawn, 
before the house-windows. My patron, hearing the 
screams, puts down his paper, adjusts his spec¬ 
tacles, slowly apprehends what is going on, and 
rings the bell for his smallest footman. “ John, 
take my card and compliments to that gentleman 
outside the hedge, and tell him that his proceedings 
are abnormal, and, I may add, to me personally 
offensive. Had that road passed through my prop¬ 
erty, I should have felt it my duty to interfere.” 
John takes the card, and returns with it; the ticket- 
of-leave man finishes his work at his leisure; but, the 
screams ceasing as he fills the girl's mouth with clay. 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 263 

the English gentleman returns to his muffins, and 
congratulates himself on having “ kept out of that 
mess.” Presently afterwards he sends for me to 
know if I shall be ready to lecture on Monday. I am 
somewhat nervous, and answer—I fear rudely— 
“ Sir, your son is a good lad; I hope he will grow to 
be a man—but, for the present, I cannot teach him 
anything. I should like, indeed, to teach you some¬ 
thing, but have no words for the lesson.” Which 
indeed I have not. If I say any words on such 
matters, people ask me, “ Would I have the country 
go to war ? do I know how dreadful a thing war 
is?” Yes, truly, I know it. I like war as ill as 
most people—so ill, that I would not spend twenty 
millions a year in making machines for it, neither 
my holidays and pocket money in playing at it; 
yet I would have the country go to war, with haste, 
in a good quarrel; and, which is perhaps eccentric 
in me, rather in another’s quarrel than in her own. 
We say of ourselves complacently that we will not 
go to war for an idea; but the phrase interpreted 
means only, that we will go to war for a bale of 
goods, but not for justice npr for mercy .—Arrows 
of the Chace , II., p. 26. 

A Nation’s real Strength, —Observe what the 
standing of nations on their defence really means. 
It means that, but for such armed attitude, each of 
them would go and rob the other; that is to say, 
that the majority of active persons in every nation 
are at present—thieves. I am very sorry that this 
should still be so; but it will not be so long. Na¬ 
tional exhibitions, indeed, will not bring peace; 
but national education will, and that is soon com¬ 
ing. I can judge of this by my own mind, for I am 
myself naturally as covetous a person as lives in 
this world, and am as eagerly-minded to go and 
steal some things the French have got, as any 
housebreaker could be, having clue to attractive 
spoons. If I could by military incursion carry off 
Paul Veronese’s “Marriage in Cana,” and the 
“ Venus Victrix” and the “Hours of St. Louis,” it 


254 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


would give me the profoundest satisfaction to ac¬ 
complish the foray successfully; nevertheless, being 
a comparatively educated person, I should most 
assuredly not give myself that satisfaction, though 
there were not an ounce of gunpowder, nor a bayo¬ 
net, in all Prance. I have not the least mind to 
rob anybody, however much I may covet what they 
have got; and I know that the French and British 
public may and will, with many other publics, be 
at last brought to be of this mind also; and to see 
farther that a nation’s real strength and happiness 
do not depend on properties and territories, nor on 
machinery for their defence; but on their getting 
such territory as they have , well filled with none but 
respectable persons. Which is a way of infinitely 
enlarging one’s territory, feasible to every poten¬ 
tate; and dependent nowise on getting Trent turned, 
or Rhine-edge reached. 

Not but that, in the present state of things, it 
may often be soldiers’ duty to seize territory, and 
hold it strongly; but only from banditti, or savage 
and idle persons. Thus, both Calabria and Greece 
ought to have been irresistibly occupied long ago. 
—Time and Tide , p. 108. 

The true Soldier. —The security of treasure to 
all the poor, and not the ravage of it down the val¬ 
leys of the Shenandoah, is indeed the true warrior’s 
work. But, that they may be able to restrain vice 
rightly, soldiers must themselves be first in virtue; 
and that they may be able to compel labor sternly, 
they must themselves be first in toil, and their 
spears, like Jonathan’s at Beth-aven, enlighteners 
of the eyes .—Time and Tide , p. 112. 

Advice to Soldiers.— Suppose, instead of this 
volunteer marching and countermarching, you 
were to do a little volunteer ploughing and counter- 
ploughing? It is more difficult to do it straight: 
the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful 
than for merely rhythmic footsteps. . . . Or, con¬ 
ceive a little volunteer exercise with the spade, 


SOCIAL rillLOSOrilY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 255 


other than such as is needed for moat and breast¬ 
work.— Munera Pulveris, p. 120. 

Dress of Soldier and Peasant.— Quite one of 
the cliiefest art-mistakes and stupidities of men has 
been their tendency to dress soldiers in red clothes, 
and monks, or pacific persons, in black, white, or 
grey ones. At least half of that mental bias of 
young people, which sustains the wickedness of 
war among us at this day, is owing to the prettiness 
of uniforms. Make all Ilussars black, all Guards 
black, all troops of the line black; dress officers and 
men, alike, as you would public executioners; and 
the number of candidates for commissions will be 
greatly diminished. Habitually, on the contrary, 
you dress these destructive rustics and their officers 
in scarlet and gold, but give your productive rustics 
no costume of honor or beauty. ... A day is 
coming, be assured, when the kings of Europe will 
dress their peaceful troops beautifully; will clothe 
their peasant girls “ in scarlet, with other delights,” 
and “ put on ornaments of gold upon their appar¬ 
el;” when the crocus and the lily will not be the 
only living things dressed daintily in our land, and 
the glory of the wisest monarclis be indeed, in that 
their people, like themselves, shall be, at least in 
some dim likeness, “arrayed like one of these.” 
— Val D'Arrio, pp. 55, 56. 

Two Kinds of Peace.— Both peace and war are 
noble or ignoble according to their kind and occa¬ 
sion. . . . But peace may be sought in two ways. 
. . . That is, you may either win your peace, or 
buy it:—win it, by resistance to evil;—buy it, by 
compromise with evil. You may buy your peace, 
with silenced consciences;—you may buy it, with 
broken vows,—buy it, with lying words,—buy it, 
with base connivances,—buy it, with the blood of 
the slain, and the cry of the captive, and the silence 
of lost souls—over hemispheres of the earth, while 
you sit smiling at your serene hearths, lisping com¬ 
fortable prayers evening and morning, and count¬ 
ing your pretty Protestant beads (which are flat. 


25G 


A R US KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


and of gold, instead of round, and of ebony, as the 
monks’ ones were), and so mutter continually to 
yourselves, “ Peace, peace,” when there is no peace; 
but only captivity and death, for you, as well as 
for those you leave unsaved;—and yours darker 
than theirs. . . . 

For many a year to come, the sword of every 
Tighteous nation must be whetted to save or sub¬ 
due; nor will it be by patience of others’ suffering, 
but by the offering of your own, that you ever will 
draw nearer to the time when the great change 
shall pass upon the iron of the earth;—when men 
shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their 
spears into pruning hooks; neither shall they learn 
war any more.— The Two Paths , pp. 133, 134. 


A DREAM-PARABLE OF WAR AND WEALTH. 

I dreamed I was at a child’s May-day party, in 
which every means of entertainment had been pro¬ 
vided for them, by a wise and kind host. It was in a 
stately house, with beautiful gardens attached to it; 
and the children had been set free in the rooms and 
gardens, with no care whatever but how to pass their 
afternoon rejoicingly. They did not, indeed, know 
much about what was to happen next day; and 
some of them, I thought, were a little frightened, 
because there was a chance of their being sent to a 
new school where there were examinations; but 
they kept the thoughts of that out of their heads 
as well as they could, and resolved to enjoy them¬ 
selves. The house, I said, was in a beautiful gar¬ 
den, and in the garden were all kinds of flowers; 
sweet grassy banks for rest; and smooth lawns for 
play; and pleasant streams and woods; and rocky 
places for climbing. And the children were happy 
for a little while, but presently they separated 
themselves into parties; and then each party de¬ 
clared, it would have a piece of the garden for its 
own, and that none of the others should have any- 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 257 


thing to do with that piece. Next, they quarrelled 
violently, which pieces they would have; and at 
last the boys took up the thing, as boys should do, 
“ practically,” and fought in the flower-beds till 
there was hardly a flower left standing; then they 
trampled down each other’s bits of the garden out of 
spite; and the girls cried till they could cry no more; 
and so they all lay down at last breathless in the 
ruin, and waited for the time when they were to be 
taken home in the evening.* 

Meanwhile, the children in the house had been 
making themselves happy also in their manner. 
For them, there had been provided every kind of 
in-doors pleasure : there was music for them to 
dance to; and the library was open, with all man¬ 
ner of amusing books; and there was a museum, 
full of the most curious shells, and animals, and 
birds; and there was a workshop, with lathes and 
carpenter’s tools, for the ingenious boys; and there 
were pretty fantastic dresses, for the girls to dress 
in; and there were microscopes, and kaleidoscopes; 
and whatever toys a child could fancy; and a table, 
in the dining-room, lgaded with everything nice to 
eat. 

But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or 
three of the more “practical” children, that they 
would like some of the brass-headed nails that 
studded the chairs; and so they set to work to pull 
them out. Presently, the others, who were reading, 
or looking at shells, took a fancy to do the like; 
and, in a little while, all the children, nearly, were 
spraining their fingers, in pulling out brass-headed 
nails. With all that they could pull out, they were 
not satisfied; and then, everybody wanted some of 
somebody else’s. And at last the really practical and 
sensible ones declared, that nothing was of any real 
consequence, that afternoon, except to get plenty 
of brass-headed nails; and that the books, and the 

* I have sometimes been asked what this means. I intended 
it to set forth the wisdom of men in war contending for king¬ 
doms, and what follows to set forth their wisdom in peace, 
contending for wealth. 



258 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


cakes, and the microscopes were of no use at all in 
themselves, but only, if they could be exchanged 
for nail-heads. And, at last they began to light 
for nail-heads, as the others fought for the bits of 
garden. Only here and there, a despised one shrank 
away into a corner, and tried to get a little quiet 
with a book, in the midst of the noise; but all the 
practical ones thought of nothing else but counting 
nail-heads all the afternoon—even though they 
knew they would not be allowed to carry so much 
as one brass knob away with them. But no—it 
was—“ who has most nails? I have a hundred, and 
you have fifty; or, I have a thousand and you have 
two. I must have as many as you before I leave 
the house, or I cannot possibly go home in peace.” 
At last, they made so much noise that I awoke, and 
thought to myself, “ What a false dream that is, of 
children .” The child is the father of the man; and 
wiser. Children never do such foolish things. Only 
men do —Mystery of Life, pp. 116, 117. 


GOVERNMENT. 

Visible governments are the toys of some nations, 
the diseases of others, the harness of some, the 
burdens of more.— Sesame and Lilies, p. 67. 

The Form of a Government immaterial.—N o 
form of government, provided it be a government 
at all, is, as such, to be either condemned or 
praised, or contested for in anywise, but by fools. 
But all forms of government are good just so far as 
they attain this one vital necessity of policy— that 
the wise and kind, few or many, shall govern the 
unwise and unkind; and they are evil so far as they 
miss of this, or reverse it. Nor does the form, in 
any case, signify one whit, but its firmness, and 
adaptation to the need; for if there be many foolish 
persons in a state, and few wise, then it is good 
that the few govern; and if there be many wise, 
and few foolish, then it is good that the many 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 250 


govern; and if many be wise, yet one wiser, then 
it is good that one should govern; and so on.— 
Munera Pulveris, p. 103. 

I see that politicians and writers of history con¬ 
tinually run into hopeless error, because they con¬ 
fuse the Form of a government with its Nature. 
A government may be nominally vested in an 
individual; and yet if that individual be in such 
fear of those beneath him, that he does nothing but 
what he supposes will be agreeable to them, the 
Government is Democratic; on the other hand, 
the Government may be vested in a deliberative 
assembly of a thousand men, all having equal au¬ 
thority, and all chosen from the lowest ranks of 
the people; and yet if that assembly act independ¬ 
ently of the will of the people, and have no fear 
of them; and enforce its determinations upon them, 
the government is Monarchical; that is to say, the 
Assembly, acting as One, has power over the Many; 
while in the case of the weak king, the Many have 
power over the One. 

A Monarchical Government, acting for its bwn 
interests, instead of the people’s, is a tyranny. I 
said the Executive Government was the hand of 
the nation;—the Republican Government is in 
like manner its tongue. The Monarchical Govern¬ 
ment is its head. All true and right Government 
is Monarchical, and of the head. What is its best 
form, is a totally different question; but unless it 
act for the people, and not as representative of the 
people, it is no government at all; and one of the 
grossest blockheadisms of the English in the present 
day, is their idea of sending men to Parliament to 
“represent their opinions/’ Whereas their only 
true business is to find out the wisest men among 
them, and send them to Parliament to represent 
their own opinions, and act upon them.— Construc¬ 
tion of Sheepfolds, p. 31. 

The Mosquito Variety of Kings.— The self- 
styled “kings” who think nations can be bought 
and sold like personal property can no more be the 


260 


A RUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


true kings of the nation than gad-flies are the kings 
of a horse; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but 
do not guide it. They, and their courts, and their 
armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large 
species of marsh-mosquito, with bayonet proboscis 
and melodious, band-mastered, trumpeting in the 
summer air.— Sesame and Lilies, p. 68. 

Young Men in Politics.— Young men have no 
business with politics at all; and when the time is 
come for them to have opinions, they will find all 
political parties resolve themselves at last into two 
—that which holds with Solomon, that a rod is 
for the fool’s back, and that which holds with the 
fool himself, that a crown is for his head, a vote 
for his mouth, and all the universe for his belly.—- 
Arrows of the Ghace, II., p. 131. 

National Parties. —Men Only associate in par¬ 
ties by sacrificing their opinions, or by having none 
worth sacrificing; and the effect of party govern¬ 
ment is always to develop hostilities and hypo¬ 
crisies, and to extinguish ideas.— Fors, I.,- p. 6. 

The Necessity op imperative Law to the 
Prosperity oP States —When the crew of a 
wrecked ship Escape in an open boat, and the boat 
is crowded, the 1 provisions scanty, and the prospect 
of making land distant, laws are instantly estab* 
lished and enforced which no one thinks of disobey* 
ing. An entire equality of claim to the provisions 
is acknowledged without dispute; and an equal 
liability to necessary labor. No man who can row 
is allowed to refuse his oar; no man, however much 
money lie may have saved in his pocket, is allowed 
so much as half a biscuit beyond his proper ration. 
Any riotous person who endangered the safety of 
the rest would be bound, and laid in the bottom 
of the boat, without the smallest compunction for 
such violation of the principles of individual lib¬ 
erty; and on the other hand, any child, or woman, 
or aged person, who was helpless, and exposed to 
greater danger and suffering by their weakness, 
would receive more than ordinary care and indul- 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 261 

gence, not unaccompanied with unanimous self- 
sacrifice, on the part of the laboring crew. . . . 

Now, the circumstances of every associated group 
of human society, contending bravely for national 
honors, and felicity of life, differ only from those 
thus supposed, in the greater, instead of less, neces¬ 
sity for the establishment of restraining law. . . . 
The impossibility of discerning the effects of indi¬ 
vidual error and crime, or of counteracting them 
by individual effort, in the affairs of a great nation, 
renders it tenfold more necessary than in a small 
society that direction by law should be sternly es¬ 
tablished. Assume that your boat’s crew is disor¬ 
derly and licentious, and will, by agreement, submit 
to no order;—the most troublesome of them will yet 
be easily discerned; and the chance is that the best 
man among them knocks him down. Common 
instinct of self-preservation will make the rioters 
put a good sailor at the helm, and impulsive pity 
and occasional help will be, by heart and hand, 
here and there given to visible distress. Not so in 
the ship of the realm. The most troublesome per¬ 
sons in it are usually the least recognized for such, 
and the most active in its management; the best 
men mind their own business patiently, and are 
never thought of; the good helmsman never touches 
the tiller but in the last extremity; and the worst 
forms of misery are hidden, not only from every eye, 
but from every thought. On the deck, the aspect 
is of Cleopatra’s galley—under hatches, there is a 
slave-hospital; while, finally (and this is the most 
fatal difference of all), even the few persons who 
care to interfere energetically, with purpose of doing 
good, can, in a large society, discern so little of the 
real state of evil to be dealt with, and judge so 
little of the best means of dealing with it, that half 
of their best efforts will be misdirected, and some 
may even do more harm than good .—Time and 
Tide, p. 50. 

[On the American Government and People, see 
hereafter.] 


2G2 


A R US KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


LIBERTY. 

I know not if a day is ever to come when the na¬ 
ture of right freedom will be understood, and when 
men will see that to obey another man, to labor 
for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is 
not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,— 
liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, 
and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he com- 
etli, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and 
difficulty than the man who obeys him .—Stones 
of Venice, II., p. 164. 

You will find, on fairly thinking of it, that it is 
his Restraint which is honorable to man, not his 
Liberty; and what is more, it is restraint which is 
honorable even in the lower animals. A butterfly 
is much more free than a bee; but you honor the 
bee more, just because it is subject to certain laws 
which fit it for orderly function in bee society. And 
throughout the world, of the two abstract things, 
liberty and restraint, restraint is always the more 
honorable. ... It is true, indeed, that in these 
and all other matters you never can reason finally 
from the abstraction, for both liberty and restraint 
are good when they are nobly chosen, and both are 
bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I 
repeat, it is restraint which characterizes the higher 
creature, and betters the lower creature : and, from 
the ministering of the archangel to the labor of the 
insect,—from the poising of the planets to the grav¬ 
itation of a grain of dust,—the power and glory of 
all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedi¬ 
ence, not in their freedom .—The Two Paths, pp. 
131, 132. 

Democracy axd Communism.—Now, iny dear 
friend, here is the element which is the veriest devil 
of all that have got into modern flesh; this infidelity 
of the nineteenth-century St. Thomas in there being 
anything better than himself, alive; coupled, as it 
always is, with the farther resolution—if unwillingly 
convinced of the fact—to seal the Better living thing 


SOCIAL PUILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 2G3 

down again out of his way, under the first stone 
handy .—Time and Tide , p. 113. 

The Influence of Machinery upon Politics.— 
It is verily this degradation of the operative into a 
machine, which, more than any other evil of the 
times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere 
into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a 
freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to 
themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, 
find against nobility, is not forced from them either 
by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified 
pride. These do much, and have done much in all 
ages; but the foundations of society were never 
yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that 
men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in 
the work by which they make their bread, and 
therefore look to wealth as the only means of 
pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the 
scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure 
their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to 
which they are condemned is verily a degrading 
one, and makes them less than men .—Stones of 
Venice , II., p. 164. 

The “ Free Hand ” in Drawing. —Try to draw 
a circle yourself with the “ free ” hand, and with a 
single line. You cannot do it if your hand trem¬ 
bles, nor if it hesitates, nor if it is unmanageable, 
nor if it is in the common sense of the word “ free.” 
So far from being free, it must be under a control 
as absolute and accurate as it it were fastened to an 
inflexible bar of steel. And yet it must move, 
under this necessary control, with perfect, untor¬ 
mented serenity of ease. That is the condition of 
all good work whatsoever. All freedom is error— 
Athena , p. 111. 

Modern Liberty.—You will send your child, 
will you, into a room where the table is loaded with 
sweet wine and fruit—some poisoned, some not?— 
you will say to him, “ Choose freely, my little child ! 
It is so good for you to have freedom of choice : it 
forms your character—your individuality ! If you 


264 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


take the wrong cup, or the wrong berry, you will 
die before the day is over, but you will have acquired 
the dignity of a Free child ! ” 

You think that puts the case too sharply ? I tell 
you, lover of liberty, there is no choice offered to 
you, but it is similarly between life and death. 
There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the 
wrong deed or option has poison in it which will 
stay in your veins thereafter forever. Never more 
to all eternity can you be as you might have been, 
had you not done that—chosen that. . . . 

The liberty of expression, with a great nation, 
would become like that in a well-educated com¬ 
pany, in which there is indeed freedom! of speech, 
but not of clamor; or like that in an orderly senate, 
in which men who deserve to be heard, are heard 
in due time, and under determined restrictions. 
The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a 
number of men is in the inverse ratio of their de¬ 
sire for it; and a general hush, or call to order, 
would be often very desirable in this England of 
ours. . . . 

The arguments for liberty may in general be 
summed in a few very simple forms, as follows :— 

Misguiding is mischievous : therefore guiding is. 

If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch: 
therefore, nobody should lead anybody. 

Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields; 
much more bears and wolves. 

If a man’s gun and shot are his own, he may fire 
in any direction he pleases. 

A fence across a road is inconvenient; much more 
one at the side of it. 

Babes should not be swaddled with their hands 
bound down to their sides: therefore they should 
be thrown out to roll in the kennels naked.—. 
Athena , pp. 114-117. 


FRESH AIR AND LIGHT. 

Fields green and Faces ruddy.— I tell you, 
gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 265 


country breathe the pure breath of heaven again, 
^,nd receive again a soul into her body, instead of 
ratting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with 
carbonic acid (and great that way), you must 
think, and feel, for your England, as well as fight 
for her : you must teach her that all the true great¬ 
ness she ever had, or ever can have, she won while her 
fields were green and her faces ruddy;—that great¬ 
ness is still possible for Englishmen, even though 
the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the 
sky black over their heads .—Grown of Wild Olive , 

p. 88. 

Fresh Air. —There are now not many European 
gentlemen, even in the highest classes, who have 
a pure and right love of fresh air. They would put 
the filth of tobacco even into the first breeze of a 
May morning .—Time and Tide , p. 22. 

Rural vs. City Life.— In the country every 
morning of the year brings with it a new aspect of 
springing or fading nature; a new duty to be ful¬ 
filled upon earth, and a new promise or warning 
in heaven. No day is without its innocent hope, 
its special prudence, its kindly gift, and its sublime 
danger; and in every process of wise husbandry, 
and every effort of contending or remedial courage, 
the wholesome passions, pride and bodily power 
of the laborer, are excited and exerted in happiest 
unison. The companionship of domestic, the care 
of serviceable animals, soften and enlarge his life 
with lowly charities, and discipline him in familiar 
wisdoms and unboastful fortitudes; while the di¬ 
vine laws of seed-time which cannot be recalled, 
harvest which cannot be hastened, and winter in 
which no man can work, compel the impatiences 
and coveting of his heart into labor too submissive 
to be anxious, and rest too sweet to be wanton. 
What thought can enough comprehend the con¬ 
trast between such life, and that in streets where 
summer and winter are only alternations of heat 
and cold; where snow never fell white, nor sun¬ 
shine clear; where the ground is only a pavement, 


260 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


and the sky no more than the glass roof of an 
arcade; where the utmost power of a storm is to 
choke the gutters, and the finest magic of spring, 
to change mud into dust: where—chief and most 
fatal difference in state, there is no interest of occu¬ 
pation for any of the inhabitants but the routine 
of counter of desk within doors, and the effort to 
pass each other without collision outside; so that 
from morning to evening the.only possible varia¬ 
tion of the monotony of the hours, and lightening 
of the penalty of existence, must be some kind of 
mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary 
godsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the 
slitting of a pocket.— Fiction—Fair and Foul, pp.7,8. 

Fair and Foul. —In my young days, Croxsted 
Lane was a green by-road traversable for some 
distance by carts; but rarely so traversed, and, for 
the most part, little less than a narrow strip of 
untilled field, separated by blackberry hedges from 
the better cared-for meadows on each side of it: 
growing more weeds, therefore, than they, and 
perhaps in spring a primrose or two—white arch¬ 
angel-daisies plenty, and purple thistles in au¬ 
tumn. A slender rivulet, boasting little of its 
brightness, for there are no springs at Dulwich, 
yet fed purely enough by the rain and morning 
dew, here trickled—there loitered—through the 
long grass beneath the hedges, and expanded it¬ 
self, where it might, into moderately clear and 
deep pools, in which, under their veils of duck¬ 
weed, a freshrwater shell or two, sundry curious 
little skipping shrimps, any quantity of tadpoles 
in their time, and even sometimes a tittlebat, offered 
themselves to my boyhood’s pleased, and not inac¬ 
curate, observation. There, my mother and I used 
to gather the first buds of the hawthorn; and there, 
in after years, I used to walk in the summer shad¬ 
ows, as in a place wilder and sweeter than our gar¬ 
den, to think over any passage I wanted to make 
better than usual in Modern Painters. . . . The 
fields on each side of it are now mostly dug up for 
building, or cut through into gaunt corners and 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ECONOMIC CANONS. 2G7 

nooks of blind ground by the wild crossings and 
concurrencies of three railroads. Half a dozen 
handfuls of new cottages, with Doric doors, are 
dropped about here and there among the gashed 
ground : the lane itself, now entirely grassless, is a 
deep-rutted, heavy-liillocked cart-road, diverging 
gatelessly into various brick-fields or pieces of waste; 
and bordered on each side by heaps of — nades 
only knows what!—mixed dust of every unclean 
thing that can crumble in drought, and mildew of 
every unclean thing that can rot or rust in damp : 
ashes and rags, beer-bottles and old shoes, battered 
pans, smashed crockery, shreds of nameless clothes, 
door-sweepings, floor-sweepings, kitchen garbage, 
back-garden sewage, old iron, rotten timber jagged 
with out-torn nails, cigar-ends, pipe-bowls, cinders, 
bones, and ordure, indescribable; and, variously 
kneaded into, sticking to, or fluttering foully here 
and there over all these,—remnants broadcast, of 
every manner of newspaper advertisement or big- 
lettered bill, festering and flaunting out their last 
publicity in the pits of stinking dust and mortal 
slime.— Fiction—Fair and Foul, pp. 3, 4. 

Letter to Thos. Dixotf.— March 21, 18G7. I see, 
by your last letter, for which 1 heartily thank you, 
that you would not sympathize with me - in my sor¬ 
row for the desertion of his own work by Gfeorge 
Cruikshank, that he may fight in the front of the 
temperance ranks. But you do not know what 
work he has left undone, nor how much richer in¬ 
heritance you might have received from his hand. 
It was no more his business to etch diagrams of 
drunkenness than it is mine at this moment to 
be writing these letters against anarchy. It is the 
first mild day of March (high time, I think, that it 
should be !), and by rights 1 ought to be out among 
the budding banks and hedges, outlining sprays of 
ha’wthorn, and clusters of primrose. This is my 
right work; and it is not, in the inner gist and truth 
of it, right nor good for you, or for anybody else, 
that Cruikshank with his great gift, and I with my 
weak, but yet tlioroughily clear and definite one, 


263 


A liUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


should both of us be tormented by agony of indig¬ 
nation and compassion, till we are forced to give 
up our peace, and pleasure, and power; and rush 
down into the streets and lanes of the city, to do 
the little that is in the strength of our single.hands 
against their uncleanliness and iniquity. But, as 
in a sorely besieged town, every man must to the 
ramparts, whatsoever business he leaves, so neither 
he nor I have had any choice but to leave our 
household stuff, and go on crusade, such as we are 
called to; not that I mean, if Fate may be anywise 
resisted, to give up the strength of my life, as he has 
given his; for I think he was wrong indoingso; and 
that he should only have carried the fiery cross his 
appointed leagues, and then given it to another 
hand: and, for my own part, I mean these very 
letters to close my political work for many a day; 
and I write them, not in any hope of their being at 
present listened to, but to disburden my heart of 
the witness I have to bear, that I may be free to go 
back to my garden lawns, and paint birds and 
flowers there .—Time and Tide, pp. 52, 53. 

L’Envoi. —Bred in luxury, which 1 perceive to 
have been unjust to others, and destructive to my¬ 
self; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in 
all my own conduct in life—and blown about hope¬ 
lessly by storms of passion—I, a man clothed in 
soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the wind, have 
yet this Message to all men again entrusted to me : 
“ Behold, the axe is laid to the root of the trees. 
Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth not forth good 
fruit, shall be hewn down and cast into the fire.”— 
Fors, III., p. 45. 

Whether I am spared to put into act anything 
here designed for my country’s help, or am shielded 
by death from the sight of her remediless sorrow, I 
have already done for her as much service as she 
has will to receive, by laying before her facts vital 
to her existence, and unalterable by her power, in 
words of which not one has been warped by in¬ 
terest nor weakened by fear; and which are as pure 
from selfish passion as if they were spoken already 
out of another world .—Arrows of the Chace, I., p. 7. 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ED UCA TIO N. 


269 


CHAPTER II. 

Education.* 

I take Wordsworth’s single line, 

“ We live by admiration, hope, and love,” 

for my literal guide, in all education.— Fors, II., 
p. 340. 

All education must be moral first; intellectual 
secondarily.— Fors, III., p. 250. 

There is one test by which you can all determine 
the rate of your real progress. 

Examine, after every period of renewed industry, 
how far you have enlarged your faculty of admira¬ 
tion. 

Consider how much more you can see to rever¬ 
ence, in the work of masters; and how much more 
to love, in the work of nature.— A Joy For Ever , 
p. 127. 

By this you may recognize true education from 
false. False education is a delightful thing, and 
warms you, and makes you every day think more of 
yourself. And true education is a deadly cold 
thing, with a Gorgon’s head on her shield, and 
makes you every day think worse of yourself. 

Worse in two ways, also, more’s the pity. It is 
perpetually increasing the personal sense of ignor¬ 
ance and the personal sense of fault.— Time and 
Tide, p. 115. 

Modern “Education” for the most signifies 
giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on 
every conceivable subject of importance to them.— 
Sesame and Lilies, p. 46. 

To make your children capable of honesty is the 
beginning of education. Make them men first, and. 


* On the education of girls, see Part III., Chapter III., 
“ Women.” For autobiographical anecdotes of Ruskin on his 
early education, see Part V., Chapter III., “ Personal.” 



270 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


religious men afterwards, and all will be sound; 
but a knave’s religion is always the rottcnest thing 
about him .—Time and Tide, p. 30. 

The first condition under which education can 
be given usefully is, that it should be clearly under¬ 
stood to be no means of getting on in the world; 
but a means of staying pleasantly in your place 
there .—Time and Tide, p. G7. 

Education, rightly comprehended, consists, half 
of it, in making children familiar with natural 
objects, and the other half in teaching the practice 
of piety towards them (piety meaning kindness to 
living things, and orderly use of the lifeless.)— Fors, 
IV., p. 378. 

You do not educate a man by telling him what 
he knew not, but by making him what he was not; 
and making him what he will remain forever: 
for no wash of weeds will bring back the faded 
purple. And in that dyeing there are two processes 
—first, the cleansing and wringing-out, which is the 
baptism with water; and then the infusing of the 
blue and scarlet colors, gentleness and justice, 
which is the baptism with fire .—Munera Pulveris, 
p. 90. 

The Meat of Knowledge.— Think what a deli¬ 
cate and delightful meat that used to be in old days, 
when it was not quite so common as it is now, and 
when young people—the best sort of them—really 
hungered and thirsted for it. Then a youth went 
up to Cambridge, or Padua, or Bonn, as to a feast 
of fat things, of wines on the lees, well-refined. But 
now, he goes only to swallow,—and, more ’s the 
pity, not even to swallow as a glutton does, with 
enjoyment; not even—forgive me the old Aristotel¬ 
ian Greek, ijSonev os rrj —pleased with the going 
down, but in the saddest and exactest way, as a 
constrictor does, tasting nothing all the time. You 
remember what Professor Huxley told you—most 
interesting it was, and new to me—of the way the 
great boa does not in any true sense sw r allow, but 
only hitches himself on to his meat like a coal-sack; 


SOCIAL PIIIL 0 SOm Y—ED UCA TION. 


271 


—well, that’s the exact way you expect your poor 
modern student to hitch himself on to his meat, 
catching and notching his teeth into it*, and drag¬ 
ging the skin of him tight over it,—till at last—you 
know I told you a little while ago our artists didn’t 
know a snake from a sausage,—but, Heaven help 
us, your University doctors are going on at such a 
rate that it will be all we can do, soon, to know a 
man from a sausage.— Deucalion , p. 202. 

Education the Eliciting of in-born Quali¬ 
ties. —In the handful of shingle which you gather 
from the sea-beach, which the indiscriminate sea, 
with equality of eternal foam, has only educated to 
be, every one, round, you will see little difference 
between the noble and mean stones. But the 
jeweller’s trenchant education of them will tell you 
another story. Even the meanest will be better for 
it, but the noblest so much better that you can 
class the two together no more. The fair veins and 
colors are all clear now, and so stern is Nature’s 
intent regarding this, that not only will the polish 
show which is best, but the best will take the most 
polish. You shall not merely see they have more 
virtue than the others, but see that more of vir¬ 
tue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the 
more dimly you shall see what there is of it .—Time 
and Tide, p. 114. 

Genius must be cherished and encouraged.— 
We have no ground for concluding that Giotto 
would ever have been more than a shepherd, if 
Cimabue had not by chance found him drawing; 
or that among the shepherds of the Apennines there 
were no other Giottos, undiscovered by Cimabue. 
We are too much in the habit of considering happy 
accidents as what are called “ special Providences;” 
and thinking that when any great work needs to be 
done, the man who is to do it will certainly be 
pointed out by Providence, be he shepherd or sea- 
boy; and prepared for his work by all kinds of 
minor providences, in the best possible way. 
Whereas all the analogies of God's operations in 


272 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


other matters prove the contrary of this; we find 
that “ of thousand seeds, He often brings but one 
to bear,” often not one; and the one seed which 
He appoints to bear is allowed to bear crude or per¬ 
fect fruit according to the dealings of the husband¬ 
man with it .—A Joy For Ever, p. 97. 

“Look Out and not In.”—Do you think you 
can know yourself by looking into yourself? 
Never. You can know what you are, only by look¬ 
ing out of yourself. Measure your own powers 
with those of others; compare your own interests 
with those of others; try to understand what you 
appear to them, as well as what they appear to 
you; and judge of yourselves, in all things, rela¬ 
tively and subordinate^; not positively : starting 
always with a wholesome conviction of the proba¬ 
bility that there is nothing particular about you. 
For instance, some of you perhaps think you can 
write poetry. Dwell on your own feelings and 
doings :—and you will soon think yourselves Tenth 
Muses; but forget your own feelings; and try, in¬ 
stead, to understand a line or two of Chaucer or 
Dante : and you will soon begin to feel yourselves 
very foolish girls—which is much like the fact.— 
Ethics of the Dust, Lect. V. 

Action and Character set their Sear on 
the Face. —Every right action and true thought 
sets the seal of its beauty on person and face; every 
wrong action and foul thought its seal of distortion; 
and the various aspects of humanity might be read 
as plainly as a printed history, were it not that the 
impressions are so complex that it must always in 
some cases (and, in the present state of our knowl¬ 
edge, in all cases), be impossible to decipher them 
completely. Nevertheless, the face of a consistently 
just, and of a consistently unjust person, may al¬ 
ways be rightly distinguished at a glance; and if 
the qualities are continued by descent through a 
generation or two, there arises a complete distinc¬ 
tion of race. Both moral and physical qualities 
are communicated by descent, far more than they 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 273 

can be developed by education (though both may 
be destroyed by want of education); and there is as 
yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person 
and mind which the human creature may attain, 
by persevering observance of the laws of God re¬ 
specting its birth and training .—Munera Pulveris, 

p, 21. 

The; young Mind is Plastic.— The human soul, 
in youth, is not a machine of which you can polish 
the cogs with any kelp or brickdust near at hand; 
and, having got it into working order, and good, 
empty, and oiled serviceableness, start your im¬ 
mortal locomotive, at twenty-five years old or thirty, 
express from the Strait Gate, on the Narrow Road. 
The whole period of youth is one essentially of 
formation, edification, instruction (I use the words 
with their weight in them); in taking of stores, 
establishment in vital habits, hoxies and faiths. 
There is not an hour of it but is trembling with 
destinies—not a moment of which, once past, the 
appointed work can ever be done again, or the 
neglected blow struck on the cold iron. Take your 
vase of Venice glass out of the furnace, and strew 
chaff oyer it in its transparent heat, and recover 
that to its clearness and rubied glory when the north 
wind has blown npon it; but do not think to strew 
chaff over the child fresh from God’s presence, and 
to bring the heavenly colors back to him—at least 
in this world .—Modern Painters , IV., p. 431. 

Certain early Habits ineradicable.— It is 
wholly impossible—this I say from too sorrowful 
experience—to conquer by any effort or time, habits 
of the hand (much in ore of head and soul), with 
which the vase of flesh has been formed and filled 
in youth,—the law of God being that parents shall 
compel the child, jn tlie day of its obedience, into 
habits of hand, and eye, and soul, which, when it 
is old, shall not, by any strength, or any weakness, 
be departed from. 

[Illustration of the foregoing]. I can’t resist the 
expression of a little niece of person"1 exultation, 


274 


A HU8KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


in noticing that a figure in one of Giotto’s paintings 
holds his pencil as I do myself: no writing master, 
and no effort (at one time very steady for many 
months), having ever cured me of that way of hold¬ 
ing both pen and pencil between my fore and sec¬ 
ond finger; the third and fourth resting the backs 
of them on my paper .—Mornings in Florence , pp. 
80, 118. 

The Elective System of Education.— Whereas 
it was formerly thought that the discipline neces¬ 
sary to form the character of youth was best given 
in the study of abstract branches of literature and 
philosophy, it is now thought that the same, or a 
better, discipline may be given by informing men 
in early years of things it cannot but be of chief 
practical advantage to them afterwards to know; 
and by permitting to them the choice of any field of 
study which they may feel to be best adapted to 
their personal dispositions. I have always used 
what poor influence I possessed in advancing this 
change; nor can any one rejoice more than I in its 
practical results .—Lectures On Art. 

Your modern ideas of development imply that 
you must all turn out what you are to be, and find 
out what you are to know for yourselves, by the 
inevitable operation of your anterior affinities and 
inner consciences :—whereas the old idea of educa¬ 
tion was that the baby material of you, however 
accidentally or inevitably born, was at least to be 
by external force and ancestral knowledge, bred; 
and treated by its Fathers and Tutors as a plastic 
vase, to be shaped or mannered as they chose, 
not as it chose, and filled, when its form was well 
finished and baked, with sweetness of sound doc¬ 
trine, as with Ilybla honey, or Arabian spikenard. 
—Pleasures of England, p. 9. 

Virtue must become instinctive.— The essen¬ 
tial idea of real virtue is that of a vital human 
strength, which instinctively, constantly, and 
without motive, does what is right. You must 
train men to this by habit, as you would the branch 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ED UCA TION. 


275 


of a tree; and give them instincts and manners 
(or morals) of purity, justice, kindness, and courage. 
Once rightly trained, they act as they should, irre¬ 
spectively of all motive, of fear, or of reward.— Eth¬ 
ics of the Dust, p. 90. 

National Libraries.— I hope it will not be long 
before royal or national libraries will be founded in 
every considerable city, with a royal series of 
books in them; the same series in every one of 
them, chosen books, the best in every kind, pre¬ 
pared for that national series in the most perfect 
way possible; their text printed all on leaves of 
equal size, broad of margin, and divided into pleas¬ 
ant volumes, light in hand, beautiful, and strong, 
and thorough as examples of binder’s work; and 
that these great libraries will be accessible to all 
clean and orderly persons at all times of the day 
and evening; strict law being enforced for this 
cleanliness and quietness .—Sesame and Lilies , p. 71. 

“ Le pauvre Enfant, II ne saitpas vivre.”— 
Getting no education is by no means the worst 
thing that can happen to us. One of the pleasantest 
friends I ever had in my life was a Savoyard guide, 
who could only read with difficulty, and write 
scarcely intelligibly and by great effort. He knew 
no language but his own—no science, except as 
much practical agriculture as served him to till liis 
fields. But he was, without exception, one of the 
happiest persons, and, on the whole, one of the 
best. I have ever known; and, after lunch, when ho 
had had his half bottle of Savoy wine, he would 
generally, as we walked up some quiet valley in 
the afternoon light, give me a little lecture on phi¬ 
losophy; and after I had fatigued and provoked him 
with less cheerful views of the world than his own, 
he would fall back to my servant behind me, and 
console himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and a 
whispered “ Le pauvre enfant, il nesait pas vivre ! ” 
—{“ The poor child, he doesn’t know how to live.”) 
—Fors, I., p. 42. 


276 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


Labor and Scholarship compatible.— Educa¬ 
tion of any noble kind has of late been so constantly 
given only to the idle classes, or, at least, to those 
who conceive it a privilege to he idle,* that it is 
difficult for any person, trained in modern habits 
of thought, to imagine a true and refined scholar¬ 
ship, of which the essential foundation is to he skill 
in some useful labor.— Fors, I., p. 112. 

A Grammar of Music. —Musicians, like painters, 
are almost virulently determined in their efforts to 
abolish the laws of sincerity and purity; and to in¬ 
vent, each for his own glory, new modes of dissolute 
'Sind lascivious sound. No greater benefit could be 
conferred on the upper as well as the lowqr classes 
of society than the arrangement of a grammar of 
simple and pure music, of which the code should 
be alike taught in every school in the land. My 
attention has been long turned to this object, 
but I have never till lately had leisure to begip 
serious work upon it. During the last year, how r 
ever, I have been making experiments with a view 
to the construction of an instrument by which very 
young children could be securely taught the rela¬ 
tions of sound in the octave; unsuccessful only in 
that the form of lyre which was produced for me, 
after months of labor, by the British manufacturer, 
was as curious a creation of visible deformity as a 
Greek lyre was of grace, besides being nearly as ex¬ 
pensive as a piano ! For the present, therefore, not 
abandoning the l}ope of at lq,st attaining a simple 
stringed instrument, 1 htyve fallen back—and I 
think, probably, with final good reason---on the 
most sacred of all musical instruments, the “ Bell.” 

* Infinite nonsense is talked abqut the “ \yprk done " by the 
upper classes. I have clpne a little ipyself, ip my day, pf thp 
kind of work they boast of; hut mipp, at least, has been all play . 
Even law'yer’s, which is, on the whole, the hardest, you may 
observe to be essentially grim play, made more jovial for 
themselves by conditions which make it somewhat dismal to 
other people. Here and there we have a real worker among 
soldiers, or no soldiering would long be possible; nevertheless 
young men don’t go into the Guards with any primal or essen¬ 
tial idea of work. 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 


277 


Whether the cattle-bell of the hills, or, from the 
cathedral tower, monitor of men, I believe the 
sweetness of its prolonged tone the most delightful 
and wholesome for the ear and mind of all instru¬ 
mental sound.— Fors, IV., p. 382. 

Emulation a false Motive.— All that you can 
depend upon in a boy, as significative of true power, 
likely to issue in good fruit, is his will to work for 
the work’s sake, not his desire to surpass his school¬ 
fellows; and the aim of the teaching you give him 
ought to be to prove to him and strengthen in him 
liis own separate gift, not to puff him into swollen 
rivalry with those who are everlastingly greater 
than he: still less ought you to hang favors and 
ribands about the neck of the creature who is the 
greatest, to make the rest envy him. Try to make 
them love him and follow him, not struggle with 
him .—A Joy For Ever , p. 99. 

Gladness. —All literature, art, and science are 
vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be 
glad; and glad justly. And I feel it distinctly my 
duty, though with solemn and true deference to the 
masters of education in this university [Oxford], to 
say that I believe our modern methods of teaching, 
and especially the institution of severe and frequent 
examination, to be absolutely opposed to this great 
end; and that the result of competitive labor in 
youth is infallibly to make men know all they learn 
wrongly, and hate the habit of learning.— Eagle's 
Nest, p. 108. 

The Competitive System.— The madness of 
the modern cram and examination system arises 
principally out of the struggle to get lucrative 
places; but partly also out of the radical block- 
headism of supposing that all men are naturally 
equal, and can only make their way by elbowing; 
—the facts being that every child is born with an 
accurately defined and absolutely limited capacity; 
that he is naturally (if able at all) able for some 
things and unable for others; that no effort and 
no teaching can add one particle to the granted 


278 


A RUSKIJST ANTHOLOGY. 


ounces of his available brains; that by competition 
he may paralyze or pervert his faculties, but can¬ 
not stretch them a line; and that the entire grace, 
happiness, and virtue of his life depend on his 
contentment in doing what he can, dutifully, and 
in staying where he is, peaceably. So far as he 
regards the less or more capacity of others, his 
superiorities are to be used for their help, not for 
his own pre-eminence; and his inferiorities to be 
no ground of mortification, but of pleasure in the 
admiration of nobler powers. It is impossible to 
express the quantity of delight I used to feel in the 
power of Turner and Tintoret, when my own skill 
was nascent only; and all good artists will admit 
that there is far less personal pleasure in doing 
a thing beautifully than in seeing it beautifully 
done. Therefore, over the door of every school, 
and the gate of every college, I would fain see en¬ 
graved in their marble the absolute forbidding 

Kara epiOeiav r) /cevo8o£ Lav “ Let liotllilig be done tlll’OUgh 

strife or vain glory.” 

And I would have fixed for each age of children 
and students a certain standard of pass in examina¬ 
tion, so adapted to average capacity and power of 
exertion, that none need fail who had attended to 
their lessons and obeyed their masters; while its 
variety of trial should yet admit of the natural dis¬ 
tinctions attaching to progress in especial subjects 
and skill in peculiar arts. Beyond such indication 
or acknowledgment of merit, there should be nei¬ 
ther pi'izes nor honors; these are meant by Heaven 
to be the proper rewards of a man’s consistent and 
kindly life, not of a youth’s temporary and selfish 
exertion. 

Nor, on the other hand, should the natural tor¬ 
por of wholesome dulness be disturbed by provo¬ 
cations, or plagued by punishments. The wise 
proverb ought in every school-master’s mind to be 
deeply set—“You cannot make a silk purse of a 
sow’s ear;” expanded with the farther scholium 
that the flap of it will not be in the least disguised 
by giving it a diamond earring. If, in a woman, 


SOCIA L PHILOSOPHY—El) UCA TION. 


279 


beauty without discretion be as a jewel of gold in 
a swine's snout, much more, in man, woman, or 
child, knowledge without discretion—the knowl¬ 
edge which a fool receives only to puff up his 
stomach, and sparkle in his cockscomb. . . . 

It is in the wholesome indisposition of the aver¬ 
age mind for intellectual labor that due provision 
is made for the quantity of dull work which must 
be done in stubbing the Thornaby wastes of the 
world.— Fors, IV., pp. 380, 381. 

Facts and System. —All sciences should, I 
think, be taught more for the sake of their facts, 
and less for that of their system, than heretofore. 
Comprehensive and connected views are impossible 
to most men; the systems they learn are nothing 
but skeletons to them; but nearly all men can un¬ 
derstand the relations of a few facts bearing on 
daily business, and to be exemplified in common 
substances. And science will soon be so vast that 
the most comprehensive men will still be narrow, 
and we shall see the fitness of rather teaching our 
youth to concentrate their general intelligence 
highly on given points than scatter it towards an 
infinite horizon from which they can fetch nothing, 
and to which they can carry nothing.— Arrows of 
the Chace, I., p. 49. 

Words. —You must get into the habit of looking 
intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their 
meaning, syllable by syllable—nay letter by letter 
. . . . you might read all the books in the British 
Museum (if you could live long enough), and re¬ 
main an utterly “ illiterate,” uneducated person; 
but if you read-ten pages of a good book, letter by 
letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are 
for evermore in some measure an educated per¬ 
son. . . . 

A well-educated gentleman may not know many 
languages—may not be able to speak any but his 
own—may have read very few books. But what¬ 
ever language he knows, he knows precisely; what¬ 
ever word he pronounces he pronounces rightly; 


280 


A HUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


above all., he is learned in the peerage of words; 
knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, 

at a glance, from words of modern canaille. 

An uneducated person may know by memory any 
number of languages, and talk them all, and yet 
truly know not a word of any—not a word even of 
his own. ... It is right that a false Latin quan¬ 
tity should excite a smile in the House of Commons; 
but it is wrong that a false English meaning should 
not excite a frown there. Let the accent of words 
be watched, by all means, but let their meaning be 
watched more closely still, and fewer will do the 
work. A few words, well chosen and well distin¬ 
guished, will do work that a thousand cannot, 
Avhen every one is acting, equivocally, in the func¬ 
tion of another. . . . 

There are masked words abroad which nobody 
understands, but which everybody uses, and most 
people will also fight for, live for, or even die for, 
fancying they mean this, or that, or the other, of 
things dear to them: for such words wear cha¬ 
meleon cloaks—“ groundlion ” cloaks, of the color 
of the ground of any man’s fancy : on that ground 
they lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from 
it. There were never creatures of prey so mischiev¬ 
ous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners 
so deadly, as these masked words .—Sesame and 
Lilies, pp. 37, 38. 

If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it; 
young or old—girl or boy—whoever you may be, if 
you think of reading seriously (which, of course, 
implies that you have some leisure at command), 
learn your Greek alphabet; then get good diction¬ 
aries of all these languages, and whenever you are 
in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently i 
Read Max Muller’s lectures thoroughly, to begin 
with; and, after that, never let a word escape you 
that looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you 
Avill find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, 
endlessly amusing. And the general gain to yohi* 
character, in power and precision,- will be quite 
incalculable .—Sesame and Lilies, p. 40« 



SO CIA L FII1L 0 SOPHY—ED UCA TION. 


281 


Beautiful Spp:aking.— The foundational im¬ 
portance of beautiful speaking lias been disgraced 
by the confusion of it With diplomatic oratory, and 
evaded by the vicious notion that it can be taught 
by a master learned in it as a separate art. The 
management of the lips, tongue, and throat may, 
and perhaps should, be so taught; but this is prop¬ 
erly the first function of the singing-master. Elocu¬ 
tion is a moral faculty; and no one is fit to be the 
head of a childrens’ school who is not both by 
nature and attention a beautiful speaker. 

By attention, I say, for fine elocution means first 
an exquisitely close attention to, and intelligence 
of, the meaning of words, and perfect sympathy 
with what feeling they describe; but indicated al¬ 
ways with reserve. In this reserve, fine reading and 
speaking, (virtually one art), differ from “ recita¬ 
tion,” which gives the statement or sentiment with 
the explanatory accent and gesture of an actor. 
In perfectly pure elocution, on the contrary, the 
accent ought, as a rule* to be much lighter and 
gentler than the natural or dramatic one, and the 
force of it wholly independent of gesture or ex¬ 
pression of feature. A fine reader should read, a 
great speaker speak, as a judge delivers his charge; 
and the test of his power should be to read or speak 
unseen. 

At least an hour of the school-day should be 
spent in listening to the master’s or some trustwor¬ 
thy visitor’s reading; but no children should attend 
unless they were really interested; the rest being 
allowed to go on with their other lessons or employ¬ 
ments. A large average of children, I suppose, are 
able to sew or draw while they yet attend to read¬ 
ing, and so there might be found a fairly large 
audience, of whom however those who were usually 
busy during the lecture should not be called upon 
for any account of what they had heard; but, on 
the contrary, blamed, if they had allowed their 
attention to be diverted by the reading from what 
they were about, to the detriment of their work. 
The real audience consisting of the few for whom 


282 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


the book had been specially chosen, should be re¬ 
quired to give perfect and unbroken attention to 
what they heard; to stop the reader always at any 
word or sentence they did not understand, and to 
be prepared for casual examination on the story 
next day. 

I say “on the story ” for the reading, whether 
poetry or prose, should always be a story of 
some sort, whether true history, travels, romance 
or fairy-tale. In poetry, Chaucer, Spenser, and 
Scott, for the upper classes, lighter ballad or fable 
for the lower, contain always some thread of pretty 
adventure. No morel}’- didactive or descriptive 
books should be permitted in the reading room, 
but so far as they are used at all, studied in the 
same way as grammars; and Shakespeare, accessible 
always at playtime in the library in small and 
large editions to the young and old alike, should 
never be used as a school book, nor even formally 
or continuously read aloud. He is to be known by 
thinking not mouthing. 

I have used, not unintentionally, the separate 
words “reading room” and library. No school 
should be considered as organized at all, without 
these two rooms, rightly furnished; the reading 
room, with its convenient pulpit and student’s 
desks, in good light, skylight if possible, for draw¬ 
ing, or taking notes—the library with its broad 
tables for laying out books on, and recesses for 
niched reading, and plenty of lateral light kept 
carefully short of glare : both of them well shut oif 
from the school room or rooms, in which there 
must be always more or less of noise.— Fors, IV., 
p. 383, 385. 

Children should be taught to see.— The main 
thing which we ought to teach our youth is to see 
something—all that the eyes w’hich God has given 
them are capable.of seeing. The sum of what we do 
teach them is to say something. As far as I have 
experience of instruction, no man ever dreams of 
teaching a boy to get to the root of a matter; to 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 


283 


think it out; to get quit of passion and desire in the 
process of thinking; or to fear no face of man in 
plainly asserting the ascertained result. But to 
say anything in a glib and graceful manner;—to 
give an epigrammatic turn to nothing,—to quench 
the dim perceptions of a feeble adversary, and parry 
cunningly the home-thrusts of a strong one,—to in¬ 
vent blanknesses in speech for breathing time, and 
slipperinesses in speech for hiding time,—to pol¬ 
ish malice to the deadliest edge, shape profession 
to the seemliest shadow, and mask self-interest 
under the fairest pretext,—all these skills we teach 
definitely, as the main arts of business and life.— 
Modern Painters , IV., p. 429. 

Sympathy as an Element of Education.— The 
chief vices of education have arisen from the one 
great fallacy of supposing that noble language is a 
communicable trick of grammar and accent, in¬ 
stead of simply the careful expression of right 
thought. All the virtues of language are, in their 
roots, moral; it becomes accurate if the speaker 
desires to be true; clear, if he speaks with sympathy 
and a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has 
earnestness; pleasant, if he has sense of rhythm and 
order. . . . The secret of language is the secret of 
sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the 
gentle. . . . No noble nor right style was ever yet 
founded but out of a sincere heart.— Lectures on 
Art , pp. 48, 49. 

No man can read the evidence of labor who is 
not himself laborious, for he does not know what 
the work costs: nor can he read the evidence of 
true passion if he is not passionate; nor of gentle¬ 
ness if he is not gentle: and the most subtle signs 
of fault and weakness of character he can only 
judge by having had the same faults to fight with. 
—Lectures on Art , p. 51. 

Against Stupidity the Gods fight in vain.— 
In education, true justice is curiously unequal—if 
you choose to give it a hard name, iniquitous. The 


284 A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 

right law of it is that you are to take most pains 
with the best material. Many conscientious masters 
will plead for the exactly contrary iniquity, and 
say you should take the most pains With thd dullest 
boys. But that is not so (only you must be Very 
careful that you know which dre the dull boys; 
for the cleverest look often very like them): Never 
waste pains on bad groiind; let it remain rough, 
though properly looked after and cared for; it will 
be of best service so; but spare no labor dn the 
good, or on What has in it the capacity of gdod. 
The tendency of modern help and care is quite 
morbidly and madly in reverse of this great princi¬ 
ple. Benevolent persons are Always, by preference, 
busy on the essentially bad; and dxhaust them¬ 
selves in their efforts to get maximuni intellect 
from cretins and maximum virtue from criminals* 
Meantime, they take no care to ascertain (and for 
the most part When ascertained, obstinately refuse 
to remove) the continuous sources of cretinism and 
crime, and Suffer the nioSt splendid material in 
child-naturte to wander neglected about the streets* 
until it has become rotten to the degree in which 
they feel prompted to take an interest in it;— Fors, 
I., p. 114. 

The greatness Or smallness of a man is* in the 
most conclusive sense, determined for him at his 
birth, as strictly as it is determined for a fruit 
whether it is to be a currant or an apricot; Educa¬ 
tion, favorable circumstances, resolution, and in¬ 
dustry can do much; in a certain sensd they do 
everything; that is to say, they determine whether 
the poor apricot shall fall in the form of a green 
bead, blighted by an east Wind, shall be trodden 
under foot, or whether it shall expand into tender 
pride, and sweet brightness of golden velvet. But 
apricot out of currant^—great man out of small,— 
did never yet art or effort make. . . . 

Therefore it is, that every system of teaching is 
false which holds forth “great art” as in any wise 
to be taught to students, or even to be aimed at 


SOCIAL miLO SO rilY—EDUCATION. 2S5 

by them. Great art is precisely that which never 
was, nor will be taught, it is pre-eminently and 
finally the expression of the spirits of great men; 
so that the only wholesome teaching is that which 
simply endeavors to fix those characters of noble¬ 
ness in the pupil’s mind, of which it seems easily 
susceptible; and without holding out to him, as a 
possible or even probable result, that he should 
ever paint like Titian, or carve like Michael An¬ 
gelo, enforces upon him the manifest possibility, 
and assured duty, of endeavoring to draw in-a man¬ 
ner at least honest and intelligible; and cultivates 
in him those general charities of heart, sincerities 
of thought, and graces of habit which are likely to 
lead him, throughout life, to prefer openness to 
affectation, realities to shadows, and beauty to cor¬ 
ruption .—Modern Painters , III., p. 61. 

The vulgar and incomparably false saying Of 
Macaulay’s, that the intellectual giants of one age 
become the intellectual pigmies of the next, has 
been the text of too many sermons lately preached 
to you. Yoh think you are going to do better 
things—-each of you—than Titian and Phidias— 
write better than Virgil—think more wisely than 
Solomon. My good young people, this is the fool- 
ishest, quite pre-eminently—perhaps almost the 
harinfullest — notion that could possibly be put 
into youi* empty little eggshells of heads. There is 
not one in a ihillion of you who can ever be great 
in any thing. To be greater than the greatest that 
have been, is permitted perhaps to one man in 
Europe in the course of two or three centuries. 
But because you cannot be Handel and Mozart— 
is it any reason why you should not learn to sing 
u God save the Queen ” properly, Avlien you have 
a mind to ?—A Joy l?or Ever, p. 128. 

How TO BE AS WISE AS ONE’S FATHERS —You 
have all been taught by Lord Macaulay and his 
school that because you have carpets instead of 
rushes for your feet; and feather-beds instead 
of fern for your backs; and kickshaws instead of 


2SG 


A E US KIN A NTIWLOG Y. 


beef for your eating; and Drains instead of Holy 
Wells for your drinking;—that, therefore, you are 
the Cream of Creation; and every one of you a 
seven-headed Solomon. Stay in those pleasant 
circumstances and convictions if you please; but 
don't accuse your roughly bred and fed fathers of 
telling lies about the aspect the earth and sky bore 
to them ,—till you have trodden the earth as they, 
barefoot, and seen the heavens as they, face to face. 
If you care to see and to know for yourselves, you 
may do*it with little pains; you need not do any 
great thing, you need not keep one eye open and 
the other shut for ten years over a microscope, nor 
fight your way through icebergs and darkness to 
knowledge of the celestial pole. Simply do as much 
as king after king of the Saxons did,—put rough 
shoes on your feet, and a rough cloak on your 
shoulders, and walk to Rome and back. Sleep by 
the roadside, when it is fine, in the first outhouse 
you can lind, when it is wet, and live on bread and 
water, with an onion or two, all the way; and if 
the experiences which you will have to relate on 
your return do not, as may well be, deserve the 
name of spiritual, at all events you will not be 
disposed to let other people regard them either as 
Poetry or Fiction .—Pleasures of England, p. 24. 

To Certain Students of Oxford University. 
—Your youthful days in this place are to you the 
dipping of your feet in the brim of the river, which 
is to be manfully stemmed by you all your days; 
not drifted with,—nor toyed upon. Fallen leaves 
enough itis strewn with, of the flowers of the forest; 
moraine enough it bears, of the ruin of the brave. 
Your task is to cross it; your doom may be to go 
down with it, to the depths out of which there is no 
crying. Traverse it, staff in hand, and with loins 
girded, and with whatsoever law of Heaven you 
know, for your light. On the other side is the 
Promised Land, the Land of the Leal .—Art of Eng¬ 
land, p. 52. 

An Ideal University Park.—I will even ven- 


SOCIAL PHILO SO VIIY—ED UCA TION. 


287 


ture to tell you my hope, though I shall be dead 
long before its possible fulfilment, that one day the 
English people will, indeed, so far recognize what 
education means as to surround this University of 
Oxford with the loveliest park in England, twenty 
miles square; that they will forbid, in that environ¬ 
ment, every unclean, mechanical, and vulgar trade 
and manufacture, as any man would forbid them 
in his own garden;—that they will abolish every 
base and ugly building, and nest of vice and misery, 
as they would cast out a devil;—that the streams 
of the Isis and Cher well will be kept pure and quiet 
among their fields and trees; and that, within this 
park, every English wild flower that can bloom in 
lowland will be suffered to grow in luxuriance, and 
every living creature that haunts wood and stream 
know that it has happy refuge.— Eagle’s Nest , p. 
100 . 


THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN. 

The relation by Children of what they 
have seen or heard.— No discipline is of more 
use to a child’s character, with threefold bear¬ 
ing on intellect, memory, and morals, than the 
being accustomed to relate accurately what it has 
lately done and seen. . . . Children ought to be 
frequently required to give account of themselves, 
though always allowed reserve; if they ask : “I 
would rather not say, mamma,” should be accepted 
at once with serene confidence on occasion; but of 
the daily walk and work the child should take pride 
in giving full account, if questioned; the parent or 
tutor closely lopping exaggeration, investigating 
elision, guiding into order, and aiding in expres¬ 
sion. The finest historical style may be illustrated 
in the course of the narration of the events of the 
day.— Ears, IV., p. 385. 

Education for Different Spheres of Life.— 
For children whose life is to be in cities, the sub- 


288 


A HUSKIN’ ANTHOLOGY. 


jects of study should be, as far as their disposition 
will allow of it, mathematics and the arts; for cim- 
dren who are to live in the country, natural history 
of birds, insects, and plants, together with agri¬ 
culture taught practically; and for children who 
are to be seamen, physical geography, astronomy, 
and the natural history of sea fish and sea birds.— 
Time and Tide , p. 70. 

Nature a fine Educator.— For prolonged en¬ 
tertainment, no picture can be compared with the 
wealth of interest which may be found in the herb¬ 
age of the poorest field, or blossoms of the narrow¬ 
est copse. As suggestive of supernatural power, 
the passing away of a fitful rain-cloud, or opening 
of dawn, are in their change and mystery more 
pregnant than any pictures. A child would, I 
suppose, receive a religious lesson from a flower 
more willingly than from a print of one, and might 
be taught to understand the nineteenth Psalm, on 
a starry night, better than by diagrams of the con¬ 
stellations.— Modern Painters , V., p. 214. 

There used to be, thirty years ago, a little rivulet 
of the Wandel, about an inch deep, which ran over 
the carl’iage-road and under a foot-bridge just 
under the last chalk hill near Croydon. Alasl 
men came and went; and it—did not go on forever. 
It has long since been bricked over by the parish 
authorities; but there was more education in that 
stream with its minnows than you could get out of 
a hundred pounds spent yearly in the parish 
schools, even though you were to spend every 
farthing of it in teaching the nature of oxygen and 
hydrogen, and the names, and rate per minute, 
of all the rivers in Asia and America .—Lectures on 
Art , p. 77. 

Learning by Heart. —Learning by heart, and 
repitition with perfect accent and cultivated voice, 
should be made quite principal branches of school 
discipline up to the time of going to the university. 

And of writings to be learned by heart, among 
other passages of disputable philosophy and perfect 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY— EDUCA TION. 


289 


poetry, I include certain chapters of the—now for 
the most part forgotten—wisdom of Solomon; and 
of these, there is one selected portion which I should 
ieoommend not only schoolboys and girls, but per¬ 
sons of every age, if they don’t know it, to learn 
forthwith, as the shortest summary of Solomon’s 
wisdom;—namely, the seventeenth chapter of Prov¬ 
erbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, 
may be fastened in the dullest memory at the rate 
of a verse a day in the shortest month of the year. 
Storm Cloud , Lect. II., § 20. 

The two Chivalries—of the Horse and the 
Wave. —You little know how much is implied in 
the two conditions of boys’ education, . . . that 
they shall all learn either to ride or sail: nor by 
what constancy of law the power of highest disci¬ 
pline and honor is vested by Nature in the two 
chivalries—of the Horse and the Wave. Both are 
significative of the right command of man over his 
own passions; but they teach, farther, the strange 
mystery of relation that exists between his soul 
and the wild natural elements on the one hand, 
and the wild lower animals on the other.— Fors, I., 
p. 119. 

The Education of Boys in St. George’s Guild. 
—In my own school of St. George I mean to make 
the study of Christianity a true piece of intellectual 
work; my boys shall at least know what their 
fathers believed, before they make up their own 
wise minds to disbelieve it. They shall bo infidels, 
if they choose, at thirty; but only students, and 
very modest ones, at fifteen. But I shall at least 
ask of modern science so much help as shall enable 
me to begin to teach them at that age the physical 
laws relating to their own bodies, openly, thor¬ 
oughly, and with awe; and of modern civilization, 
1 shall ask so much help as may enable me to teach 
them what is indeed right, and what wrong, for the 
citizen of a state of noble humanity to do, and per¬ 
mit to be done, by others, unaccused .—Arrows of 
the Chace, II., p. 130. 


200 


A ltUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


The Study of Grammar. —I am at total issue 
with most preceptors as to the use of grammar to 
any body. In a recent examination of our Coniston 
school I observed that the thing the children did 
exactly best, was their parsing, and the thing they 
did exactly worst, their repetition. Could stronger 
proof be given that the dissection of a sentence is 
as bad a way to the understanding of it as the dis¬ 
section of a beast to the biography of it?— Fors, 
IV., p. 379. 

Lying. —It should be pointed out to young people 
with continual earnestness that the essence of lying 
is in deception, not in words;- a lie may be told by 
silence, by equivocation, by the accent on a sylla¬ 
ble, by a glance of the eye attaching a peculiar 
significance to a sentence; and all these kinds of 
lies are worse and baser by many degrees than a 
lie plainly worded .—Modern Painters, V., p. 290. 

Children taught Self-reliance. — Children 
should have their times of being off duty, like 
soldiers; and when once the obedience, if required, 
is certain, the little creature should be very early 
put for periods of practice in complete command 
of itself; set on the barebacked horse of its own 
will, and left to break it by its own strength.— 
Praeterita , II. 

The Study of History.— Every fairly educated 
European boy or girl ought to learn the history of 
five cities—Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and 
London; that of London including, or at least com¬ 
pelling in parallel study, some knowledge also of 
the history of Paris .—Pleasures of England, p. 8. 

I don’t know any Roman history except the two 
first books of Livy, and little bits here and there of 
the following six or seven. I only just know enough 
about it to be able to make out the bearings and 
meaning of any fact that I now learn. The greater 
number of modern historians know, (if honest 
enough even for that,) the facts, or something that 
may possibly be like the facts, but haven’t the 
least notion of the meaning of them. So that, 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 201 

though I have to find out everything that I want 
in Smith’s Dictionary, like any schoolboy, I can 
usually tell you the significance of what I so find, 
better than perhaps even Mr. Smith himself could. 
—Proserpina, p. 100. 

The Wordsworth Schoolhouse.— I went only 
this last month to see the school in which Words¬ 
worth was educated. It remains, as it was then, a 
school for peasant lads only; and the doors of its 
little library, therefore, hang loose on their decayed 
hinges; and one side of the schoolroom is utterly 
dark—the window on that side having been long 
ago walled up, either “ because of the window-tax, 
or perhaps it had got broken,” suggested the guar¬ 
dian of the place.— Fors, III., p. 53. 

English Parents’ idea of Education.—I re¬ 
ceive many letters from parents respecting the edu¬ 
cation of their children. . . . They never seek, as 
far as I can make out, an education good in itself; 
the conception of abstract rightness in training 
rarely seems reached by the writers. But an edu¬ 
cation “ which shall keep a good coat on my son’s 
back;—an education which shall enable him to 
ring with confidence the visitors’ bell at double- 
belled doors;—education which shall result ulti¬ 
mately in establishment of a double-belled door to 
his own house; in a word, which shall lead to 
“advancement in life .”—Sesame and Lilies , p. 28. 

Birds do not traise God in their Songs.— This 
London is the principal nest of‘men in the world; 
and I was standing in the centre of it. In the shops 
of Fleet Street and Ludgate Ilill, on each side of 
ine, I do not doubt I could have bought any quan¬ 
tity of books for children, which by way of giving 
them religious, as opposed to secular, instruction, 
informed them that birds praised God in their 
songs. Now, though on the one hand, you may be 
very certain that birds are not machines, on the 
other hand it is just as certain that they have not 
the smallest intention of praising God in their 
songs; and that we cannot prevent the religious 


<2&2 A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY . 

education of our childern more utterly than by be¬ 
ginning it in lies.— Eagle's Nest, p. 42. 

Boys and Squirrels.—As of all quadrupeds 
there is none so ugly or so miserable as the sloth, 
so, take him for all in all, there is none so beautiful, 
so happy, so wonderful as the squirrel. Innocent 
in all his ways, harmless in his food, playful as a 
kitten, but without cruelty, and surpassing the 
fantastic dexterity of the monkey, with the grace 
and the brightness of a bird, the little dark-eyed 
miracle of the forest glances from branch to branch 
more like a sunbeam than a living creature : it leaps, 
and darts, and twines, where it will;—a chamois is 
slow to it; and a panther, clumsy: grotesque as a 
gnome, gentle as a fairy, delicate as the silken 
plumes of the rush, beautiful and strong like the 
spiral of a fern,—it haunts you, listens for you, 
hides from you, looks for you, loves you, as if the 
angel that walks with your children had made it 
himself for their heavenly plaything. 

And this is what you do, to thwart alike your 
child’s angel, and his God,—you take him out of 
the woods into the town,—you send him from 
modest labor to competitive schooling,—you force 
him out of the fresh air into the dusty bone-honso, 
—you show him the skeleton of the dead monster, 
and make him pour over its rotten cells and wire- 
stitched joints, and vile extinct capacities of de¬ 
struction,—and when he is choked and sickened 
with useless horror and putrid air, you let him—re¬ 
gretting the waste of time—go out for once to play 
again by the woodside;—and the first squirrel he 
sees, he throws a stone at!— Deucalion, pp. 145, 14G. 

The best dog I ever had was a bull-terrier, whose 
whole object in life was to please me, and nothing 
else; though, if he found he could please me by hold¬ 
ing on with his teeth to an inch-thick stick, and be¬ 
ing swung round in the air as fast as I could turn, 
that was his own idea of entirely felicitous existence. 
1 don’t like, therefore, hearing of a bulldog’s being 
ill-treated; but I can tell you a little thing that 


SOCIAL PIIILOSO PHY—ED UCA TION. 


293 


chanced to me at Coniston the other day, more 
horrible, in the deep elements of it, than all the 
dog, bulldog, or bull fights, or baitings, of England, 
Spain, and California. A fine boy, the son of an 
amiable English clergyman, had come on the coach¬ 
box round the Water-head to see me, and was 
telling me of the delightful drive he had had. 
“ Oh,” he said, in the triumph of his enthusiasm, 
“and just at the corner of the wood, there was 
such a big squirrel! and the coachman threw a 
stone at it, and nearly hit it! ” 

“Thoughtlessness—only thoughtlessness ”—say 
you—proud father ? Well* perhaps not much 
worse than that. But how could it be much worse ? 
Thoughtlessness is precisely the chief public calam¬ 
ity of our day; and when it comes to the pitch, in a 
clergyman’s child, of not thinking that a stone hurts 
what it hits of living things, and not caring for 
the daintiest, dextrousest, innocentest living thing in 
the northern forests of God’s earth, except as a brown 
excrescence to be knocked off their branches,—nay, 
good pastor of Christ’s lambs, believe me, your boy 
had better have been employed in thoughtfully and 
resolutely stoning St* Stephen—if any St. Stephen 
js to be found in these days, when men not only 
can’t see heaven opened, but don’t so much as care 
to see it, shut.— Fors, IX*, p* 312, 


Ideal of an Elementary School. —Every parish 
school to have gardeu, playground, and cultivable 
land round it, or belonging to it, spacious enough to 
employ the scholars in fine weather mostly out of 
doors. 

Attached to the building, a children’s library, 
jp which the scholars who care to read may learn 
that art as deftly as they like, by themselves, help¬ 
ing each other without troubling the master;—a 
sufficient laboratory always, in which shall be 
specimens of all common elements of natural sub¬ 
stances, and where simple chemical, optical, and 
pneumatic experiments may be shown; and accord¬ 
ing to the size and importance of the school, at- 


294 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


tached workshops, many or few,—but always a 
carpenter’s, and first of those added in the better 
schools, a potter’s. 

In the school itself, the things taught will be 
music, geometry, astronomy, botany, zoology, to 
all; drawing, and history, for children who have 
gift for either. And finally, to all children of 
whatever gift, grade, or age, the laws of Honor, the 
habit of Truth, the Virtue of Humility, and the 
Happiness of Love.— Fors, IV., p. 369. 

The Decorations of School Rooms.— Many a 
study appears dull or painful to a boy, when it is 
pursued on a blotted deal desk, under a wall with 
nothing on it but scratches and pegs, which would 
have been pursued pleasantly enough in a curtained 
corner of his father’s library, or at the lattice win¬ 
dow of his cottage. Nay, my own belief is, that the 
best study of all is the most beautiful; and that a 
quiet glade of forest, or the nook of a lake shore, are 
worth all the schoolrooms in Christendom, when 
once you are past the multiplication table; but be 
that as it may, there is no question at all but that 
a time ought to come in the life of a well trained 
youth, when he can sit at a writing table without 
wanting to throw the inkstand at his neighbor; 
and when also he will feel more capable of certain 
efforts of mind with beautiful and refined forms 
about him than with ugly ones. When that time 
comes he ought to be advanced into the decorated 
schools; and this advance ought to be one of the 
important and honorable epochs of his life. . . . 

Now, the use of your decorative painting would 
be, in myriads of ways, to animate [the scholars’] 
history for them, and to put the living aspect of 
past things before their eyes as faithfully as in¬ 
telligent invention can; so that the master shall 
have nothing to do but once to point to the school¬ 
room walls, and forever afterwards the meaning of 
any word would be fixed in a boy’s mind in the 
best possible way. Is it a question of classical dress 
—what a tunic was like, or a clilamys, or a peplus ? 


SOCIAL PIIILO SOPIIY—EDUCATION. 295 

At this day, you have to point to some vile wood- 
cut, in the middle of a dictionary page, represent¬ 
ing the thing hung upon a stick; but then, you 
would point to a hundred figures, wearing the 
actual dress, in its fiery colors, in all the actions of 
various stateliness or strength; you would under¬ 
stand at once how it fell round the people’s limbs 
as they stood, how it drifted from their shoulders 
as they went, how it veiled their faces as they wept, 
how it covered their heads in the day of battle .—A 
Joy For Ever , pp. 71, 73. 


TEACHING SCIENCE TO CHILDREN. 

The Education of a little Girl.— I don’t in 
the least want a book to tell her how many species 
of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be 
for suspecting that one species is another species; 
nor why Mr. B. is convinced that what Mr. A. 
considered two species are indeed one species; nor 
how conlusively Mr. C. has proved that what Mr. 
B. described as a new species is an old species. 
Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s 
inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the 
small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a 
modern political economist; nor whether the mor¬ 
phological nature of the sternal portion of the 
thorax should induce us strictly, to call it the pro¬ 
sternum, or may ultimately be found to present no 
serious inducement of that nature. But I want a 
book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and 
how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry 
buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.* 
— Fors, II., p. 359. 

[* So Lockhart gays of Sir Walter Scott, that he detested the 
whole generation of modern school hooks with their attempt to 
teach scientific minutiae; but delighted cordially in those of 
the preceding age, which by addx-essing the imagination, ob¬ 
tained thereby, as he thought, the best chance of imparting 
solid knowledge and stirring up the mind to an interest in 
graver studies.—For fuller statements of Kuskin on teaching 
science to children, consult Proserpina, passim,and Fors Clavi- 
( jera , 1875, Letter 51.] 




29G 


A IiUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


Natural History. —I have often been unable, 
through sickness or anxiety, to follow my own art 
work, but I have never found natural history fail 
me, either as a delight or a medicine. But for 
children it must be curtly and wisely taught. We 
must show them things, not tell them names. A 
deal-chest of drawers is worth many books to them, 
and a well-guided country walk worth a hundred 
lectures.— Arrows of the Chace , I., p. 199. 

Botany. —The most pressing need is for a simple 
handbook of the wild flowers of every country— 
French flowers for French children, Teuton for 
Teuton, Saxon for Saxon, Highland for Scot—se¬ 
verely accurate in outline, and exquisitely colored 
by hand (again the best possible practice in our 
drawing schools); with a text regardless utterly of 
any but the most popular names, and of all micro¬ 
scopic observation; but teaching children the-beau¬ 
ty of plants as they grow, and their culinary uses 
when gathered; and that, except for such uses, they 
should be left growing.— Fors , IV., pp. 391, 

Botanists have discovered some wonderful con¬ 
nection between nettles and figs, which a cowboy, 
who will never see a ripe fig in his life, need not be 
at all troubled about; but it will be interesting to 
him to know what effect nettles have on hay, and 
what taste they will give to porridge; and it will 
give him nearly a new life if he can be got but once, 
in a spring-time, to look well at the beautiful circ¬ 
let of the white nettle blossom, and work out with 
his schoolmaster the curves of its petals, and the 
way it is set on its central mast. So, the xirinciple 
of chemical equivalents, beautiful as it is, matters 
far less to a peasant boy, and even to most sons of 
gentlemen, than their knowledge how to find 
whether the water is wholesome in the back-kitchen 
cistern, or whether the seven-acre field wants sand 
or chalk.— A Joy For Fver, p. 91. 

It may not be the least necessary that a peasant 
should know algebra, or Greek, or drawing. But 
it may, perhaps, be both possible and expedient 


SO CIA L PIIIL 0 SO PII y—ed uca tion. 


297 


that he should be able to arrange his thoughts 
clearly, to speak his own language intelligibly, to 
discern between right and wrong, to govern his 
passions, and to receive such pleasures of ear or 
sight as his life may render accessible to him. I 
would not have him taught the science of music; 
but most assuredly I would have him taught to 
sing. I would not teach him the science of drawing; 
but certainly I would teach him to see; without 
learning a single term of botany, he should know 
accurately the habits and uses of every leaf and 
flower in his fields; and unencumbered by any 
theories of moral and political philosophy, he 
should help his neighbor, and disdain a bribe.— 
Modern Painters , V., p. 354. 

Examination Paper for a Botanical Class.— 

1. State the habit of such and such a plant. 

2. Sketch its leaf, and a portion of its ramifica¬ 
tions (memory). 

3. Explain the mathematical laws of its growth 
and structure. 

4. Give the composition of its juices in different 
seasons. 

5. Its uses? Its relations to other families of 
plants, and conceivable uses beyond those known ? 

G. Its commercial value in London ? Mode of 
cultivation ? 

7. Its mythological meaning? The commonest 
or most beautiful fables respecting it ? 

8. Quote any important references to it by great 
poets. 

9. Time of its introduction. 

10. Describe its consequent influence on civiliza¬ 
tion. 

Of all these ten questions, there is not one which 
does not test the student in other studies than 
botany.— Arrows of the Chace , I., p. 45. 

Astronomy. —The beginning of all is to teach the 
child the places and names of the stars, when it can 
see them, and to accustom it to watch for the 
nightly change of those visible. The register of the 


298 


A HUS KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


visible stars of first magnitude and planets should 
be printed largely and intelligibly for every day of 
the year, and set by the schoolmaster every day; 
and the arc described by the sun, with its following 
and preceding stars, from point to point of the 
horizon visible at the place, should be drawn, at 
least weekly, as the first of the drawing exercises.— 
Fors, IV., p. 389. 

Geography. —Of the cheap barbarisms and abor¬ 
tions of modern cram, the frightful method of 
representing mountain chains by black bars is 
about the most ludicrous and abominable. All 
mountain chains are in groups, not bars, and their 
watersheds are often entirely removed from their 
points of greatest elevation.— Fors , IV., p. 388. 

[On Botany, see also Part IV.] 


EDUCATION IN ART.* 

If you desire to draw, that you may represent 
something that you care for, you will advance 
swiftly and safely. If you desire to draw, that you 
may make a beautiful drawing, you will never 
make one.— Laws of Fdsole, p. 13. 

Teaching to be adjusted to Capacity. —A 
young person’s critical power should be developed 
by the presence around him of the best models 
into the excellence of which his knowledge permits 
him to enter. He should be encouraged, above all 
things, to form and express judgment of his own; 
not as if his judgment were of any importance as 
related to the excellence of the thing, but that both 
his master and he may know precisely in what 
state his mind is. He should be told of an Albert 
Diirer engraving, “That is good, whether you like 
it or not; but be sure to determine whether you do 

[* On the arts as a branch of Education, see Arrows of the 
Chace, I., pp. 39-46; and the Supplement to A Joy For Ever; com¬ 
pare also Sesame and Lilies.] 




SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 290 

or do not, and why.” All formal expressions of 
reasons for opinion, such as a boy could catch up 
and repeat, should be withheld like poison; and all 
models which are too good for him should be kept 
out of his way. Contemplation of works of art, 
without understanding them, jades the faculties 
and enslaves the intelligence. A Rembrandt etch¬ 
ing is a better example to a boy than a finished 
Titian, and a cast from a leaf than one of the Elgin 
marbles .—Arrows of the Chace, I., p. 42. 

Illuminated Writing.— Every school should be 
furnished with progressive examples, in fac-simile, 
of beautiful illuminated writing: for nothing could 
be more conducive to the progress of general 
scholarship and taste than that the first natural 
instincts of clever children for the imitation or, 
often, the invention of picture writing, should be 
guided and stimulated by perfect models in their 
own kind.— Fors, IV., p. 389. 

Proportion. —Make your studies always of the 
real size of things. A man is to be drawn the size 
of a man, and a cherry the size of a cherry. 

“ But I cannot draw an elephant his real size ? ” 

There is no occasion for you to draw an elephant. 

“ But nobody can draw Mont Blanc his real 
size ? ” 

No. Therefore nobody can draw Mont Blanc at 
all; but only a distant view of Mont Blanc. You 
may also draw a distant view of a man, and of an 
elephant, if you like; you must take care that it is 
seen to be so, and not mistaken for a drawing of a 
pigmy, or a mouse, near. 

“But there is a great deal of good miniature¬ 
painting?” 

Yes, and a great deal of fine cameo-cutting. But 
I am going to teach you to be a painter, not a 
locket-decorator, or medallist. — Laws of Fesole , 

p. 18. 

Color. —You ought to love color, and to think 
nothing quite beautiful or perfect without it; and 
if you really do love it, for its own sake, and are 


300 


A 11USKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


not merely desirous to color because you think 
painting a finer thing than drawing, there is some 
chance you may color well. Nevertheless, you 
need not hope ever to produce anything more than 
pleasant helps to memory, or useful and suggestive 
sketches in color, unless you mean to be wholly an 
artist. You may, in the time which other vocations 
leave at your disposal, produce finished, beautiful, 
and masterly drawings in light and shade. But to 
color well, requires your life. It cannot be done 
cheaper. The difficulty of doing right is increased 
—not twofold nor threefold, but a thousandfold, 
and more—by the addition of color to your work. 
If you sing at all, you must sing sweetly; and if 
you color at all, you must color rightly. Give up 
all the form, rather than the slightest part of the 
color: just as, if you felt yourself in danger of a 
false note, you would give up the word and sing 
a meaningless sound, if you felt that so you could 
save the note. . . . An ill-colored picture could be 
no more admitted into the gallery of any rightly 
constituted Academy, or Society of Painters, than 
a howling dog into a concert .—Laws of Fesole, 
pp. 79, 83. 

The Yale of Tempe.—I wish I could ask you to 
draw, instead of the Alps, the crests of Parnassus 
and Olympus, and the ravines of Delphi and of 
Tempe. I have not loved the arts of Greece as 
others have; yet I love them, and her, so much, 
that it is to me simply a standing marvel how 
scholars can endure for all these centuries, during 
which their chief education has been in the lan¬ 
guage and policy of Greece, to have only the names 
of her hills and rivers upon their lips, and never 
one line of conception of them in their mind’s sight. 
Which of us knows what the valley of Sparta is 
like, or the great mountain vase of Arcadia ? which 
of us, except in mere airy syllabling of names, 
knows aught of “ sandy Ladon’s lilied banks, or 
old Lycseus, or Cyllene hoar ? ”—Lectures on Art, 
p. 72. 


SOCIAL PIIILOSOPIIY—EDUCA TION. 


301 


To foster Art-genius in a Youth.— Know once 
for all, that a poet on canvas is exactly the same 
species of creature as a poet in song, and nearly 
every error in our methods of teaching will be done 
away with. For who among us now thinks of 
bringing men up to be poets ?—of producing poets 
by any kind of general recipe or method of culti¬ 
vation ? Suppose even that we see in youth that 
which we hope may, in its development, become 
a power of this kind, should we instantly, suppos¬ 
ing that w r e wanted to make a poet of him, and 
nothing else, forbid him all quiet, steady, rational 
labor ? Should we force him to perpetual spinning 
of new crudities out of his boyish brain, and set 
before him, as the only objects of his study, the 
laws of versification which criticism has supposed 
itself to discover in the works of previous writers ? 
. . . But if we had sense, should we not rather 
restrain and bridle the first flame of invention in 
early youth, heaping material on it as one would 
on the first sparks and tongues of a fire which we 
desired to feed into greatness ? Should we not 
educate the whole intellect into general strength, 
and all the affections into warmth and honesty, 
and look to heaven for the rest ?— Pre-Raphael- 
itism , p. 17. 

The greatest Art cannot be taught.— The 
very w T ords “School of Design” involve the pro- 
foundest of Art fallacies. Drawing may be taught 
by tutors : but Design only by Heaven; and to every 
scholar who thinks to sell his inspiration Heaven 
refuses its help !—Laws of Ftsole, p. 8. 

Some ten or twelve years ago, when I was first 
actively engaged in Art teaching, a young Scottish 
student came up to London to put himself under 
me, having taken many prizes (justly, with respect 
to the qualities looked for by the judges) in various 
schools of Art. He worked under me very earnestly 
and patiently for some time; and I was able to 
praise his doings, in what I thought very high 
terms! nevertheless, there remained always a look 


302 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


of mortification on his face, after he had been 
praised, however unqualifiedly. At last, he could 
hold no longer, but one day, when I had been more 
than usually complimentary, turned to me with an 
anxious, yet not unconfident expression, and asked; 
“ Do you think, Sir, that I shall ever draw as well 
as Turner?” I paused for a second or two, being 
much taken aback; and then answered,* “It is far 
more likely you should be made Emperor of All 
the Russias. There is a new Emperor every fifteen 
or twenty years on the average; and by strange 
hap, and fortunate cabal, anybody might be made 
Emperor. But there is only one Turner in five 
hundred years, and God decides, without any 
admission of auxiliary cabal, what piece of clay his 
soul is to be putin.” 

It was the first time that I had been brought into 
direct collision with the modern, system of prize¬ 
giving and competition; and the mischief of it was, 
in the sequel, clearly shown to me, and tragically. 
This youth had the finest powers of mechanical exe¬ 
cution I have ever met with, but was quite incapa¬ 
ble of invention, or strong intellectual effort of any 
kind. Had he been taught early and thoroughly 
to know his place, and be content with his faculty, 
he would have been one of the happiest and most 
serviceable of men. But, at the art schools, he got 
prize after prize for his neat handling; and having, 
in his restricted imagination, no power of discerning 
the qualities of great work, all the vanity of his 
nature was brought out unchecked; so that, being 
intensely industrious and conscientious, as well as 
vain (it is a Scottish combination of character not 
unfrequent t), he naturally expected to become one 
of the greatest of men. My answer not only morti- 


* I do not mean that I answered in these words, but to the 
effect of them, at greater length. 

t We English are usually bad altogether in a harmonious 
way, and only quite insolent when we are quite good-for- 
nothing; the least good in us shows itself in a measure of mod¬ 
esty ; but many Scotch natures, of fine capacity otherwise, are 
rendered entirely abortive by conceit. 



SOCIA L PHILOSOPHY—EDUG A TION. 


303 


fled, but angered him, and made him suspicious 
of me; he thought I wanted to keep his talents from 
being fairly displayed, and soon afterwards asked 
leave (he was then in my employment as well as 
under my teaching) to put himself under another 
master. I gave him leave at once, telling him, “ if 
he found the other master no better to his mind, 
he might come back to me whenever he chose.” 
The other master giving him no more hope of ad¬ 
vancement than I did, he came back to me; I sent 
him into Switzerland, to draw Swiss architecture; 
but instead of doing what I bid him, quietly, and 
nothing else, he set himself, with furious industry, 
to draw snowy mountains and clouds, that he 
might show me he could draw like Albert Durer, or 
Turner;—spent his strength in agony of vain effort; 
—caught cold, fell into decline, and died. How 
many actual deaths are now annually caused by 
the strain and anxiety of competitive examination, 
it would startle us all if we could know: but the mis¬ 
chief done to the best faculties of the brain in all 
cases, and the miserable confusion and absurdity 
involved in the system itself, Avhich offers every 
place, not to the man who is indeed fitted for it, 
but to the one who, on a given day, chances to 
have bodily strength enough to stand the cruellest 
strain, are evils infinite in their consequences, and 
more lamentable than many deaths. — Fors, I., 
p. 117. 

Rapid Drawing. — I have seen a great master’s 
hand flying over the paper as fast as gnats over a 
pool; and the ink left by the light grazing of it, 
so pale, that it gathered into shade like gray lead; 
and yet the contours, and fine notes of character, 
seized with the accuracy of Holbein. But gift of 
this kind is a sign of the rarest artistic faculty and 
tact: you need not attempt to gain it, for if it is 
in you, and you work continually, the power will 
come of itself; and if it is not in you, will never 
come; nor, even if you could win it, is the attain¬ 
ment wholly desirable. Drawings thus executed 


304 


A RUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


are always imperfect, however beautiful: they are 
out of harmony with the general manner and 
scheme of serviceable art; and always, so far as I 
have observed, the sign of some deficiency of ear¬ 
nestness in the worker .—Laws of Fesole, p. 30. 

Measurement in Drawing.— The question of 
measurement is, as you are probably aware, one 
much vexed in art schools; but it is determined 
indisputably by the very first words written by 
Lionardo: “II giovane dove prima imparare pro- 
spettiva, per le misure d’ ogni cosa.” 

Without absolute precision of measurement, it is 
certainly impossible for you to learn perspective 
rightly; and as far as I can judge, impossible to learn 
anything else rightly. And in my past experience 
of teaching, I have found that such precision is of 
all things the most difficult to enforce on the pupils. 
It is easy to persuade to diligence, or provoke to 
enthusiasm; but I have found it hitherto impossible 
to humiliate one student into perfect accuracy.— 
Lectures on Art, p. 05. 

Errors of the existing popular School of 
Drawing. —The first error in that system is the 
forbidding accuracy of measurement, and enforcing 
the practice of guessing at the size of objects. Now 
it is indeed often well to outline at first by the eye, 
and afterwards to correct the drawing by measure¬ 
ment; but under the present method, the student 
finishes his inaccurate drawing to the end, and his 
mind is thus, during the whole progress of his 
work, accustomed to falseness in every contour. 
Such a practice is not to be characterized as merely 
harmful,—it is ruinous. No student who has sus¬ 
tained the injury of being thus accustomed to false 
contours, can ever recover precision of sight. Nor 
is this all: he cannot so much as attain to the first 
conditions of art judgment. For a fine work of art 
differs from a vulgar one by subtleties of line which 
the most perfect measurement is not, alone, delicate 
enough to detect; but to which precision of at¬ 
tempted measurement directs the attention; while 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY— EDUCA TION. 


305 


the security of boundaries, within which maximum 
error must be restrained, enables the hand gradu¬ 
ally to approach the perfectness which instruments 
cannot. Gradually, the mind then becomes con¬ 
scious of the beauty which, even after this honest 
effort, remains inimitable; and the faculty of dis¬ 
crimination increases alike through failure and 
success. But when the true contours are voluntar¬ 
ily and habitually departed from, the essential 
qualities of every beautiful form are necessarily 
lost, and the student remains forever unaware of 
their existence. 

The second error in the existing system is the en¬ 
forcement of the execution of finished drawings in 
light and shade, before the student has acquired 
delicacy of sight enough to observe the gradations. 
It requires the most careful and patient teaching to 
develop this faculty; and it can only be developed 
at all by rapid and various practice from natural 
objects, during which the attention of the student 
must be directed only to the facts of the shadows 
themselves, and not at all arrested on methods of 
producing them. He may even be allowed to pro¬ 
duce them as he likes, or as he can; the thing re¬ 
quired of him being only that the shade be of 
the right darkness, of the right shape, and in the 
right relation to other shades round it; and not at 
all that it shall be prettily cross hatched, or decep¬ 
tively transparent. But at present, the only virtues 
required in shadow are that it shall be pretty in 
texture and picturesquely effective; and it is not 
thought of the smallest consequence that it should 
be in the right place, or of the right depth. And the 
consequence is that the student remains, when he 
becomes a painter, a mere manufacturer of conven¬ 
tional shadows of agreeable texture, and to the end 
of his life incapable of perceiving the conditions 
of the simplest natural passage of chiaroscuro. 

The third error in the existing code, and in ulti¬ 
mately destructive power, the worst, is the con¬ 
struction of entirely symmetrical or balanced forms 
for exercises in ornamental design; whereas every 


30G 


A 11 US KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


beautiful form in this world, is varied in the minu¬ 
tiae of the balanced sides. Place the most beautiful 
of human forms in exact symmetry of position, and 
curl the hair into equal curls on both sides, and it 
will become ridiculous, or monstrous. Nor can any 
law of beauty be nobly observed without occasional 
wilfulness of violation .—Lciios of Fesole, pp. 7, G. 

Perspective. —I never met but with two men 
in my life who knew enough of perspective to draw 
a Gothic arch in a retiring plane, so that its lateral 
dimensions and curvatures might be calculated to 
scale from the drawing.— Pre-Raphaelitism , p. 20. 

No great painters ever trouble themselves about 
perspective, and very few of them know its laws; 
they draw everything by the eye, and, naturally 
enough, disdain in the easy parts of their work 
rules which cannot help them in difficult ones. It 
would take about a month’s labor to draw im¬ 
perfectly, by laws of perspective, what any great 
Venetian will draw perfectly in five minutes, wiien 
he is throwing a wreath of leaves round a head, or 
bending the curves of a pattern in and out among 
the folds of drapery. . . . Turner, though he was 
professor of perspective to the Royal Academy, did 
not know what he professed, and never, as far as 1 
remember, drew a single building in true perspec¬ 
tive in his life; he drew them only with as much 
perspective as suited him. Prout also knew nothing 
of perspective, and twisted his buildings, as Turner 
did, into whatever shapes he liked. I do not justify 
this; and would recommend the student at least to 
treat perspective with common civility, but to pay 
no court to it .—Elements of Drawing, p. 12. 

All the professors of perspective in Europe, 
could not, by perspective, draw the live of curve 
of a sea beach; nay, could not outline one pool of 
the quiet water left among the sand. The eye and 
hand can do it, nothing else. All the rules of aerial 
perspective that ever were written, will not tell me 
how sharply the pines on the hill-top are drawn at 
this moment on the sky. I shall know if I see them, 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—EDUCATION. 307 

and love them; not till then .—Stones of Venice, III., 
p. 481. 

When perspective was first invented the world 
thought it a mighty discovery, and the greatest 
men it had in it were as proud of knowing that 
retiring lines converge, as if all the wisdom of 
Solomon had been compressed into a vanishing 
point. And, accordingly, it became nearly impos¬ 
sible for any one to paint a Nativity, but he must 
turn the stable and manger into a Corinthian 
arcade, in order to show his knowledge of perspec¬ 
tive; and half the best architecture of the time, 
instead of being adorned with historical sculpture, 
as of old, Was set forth with bas-relief of minoi 4 
corridors and galleries, tlirow'n into perspective.— 
Stones of Venice, p. 60. 

Aerial Perspective.— Aerial perspective, as giv¬ 
en by the modern artist, is, in nine cases out of ten, 
a gross and ridiculous exaggeration. . . . The other 
day I showed a fine impression of Albert Durer’s 
“ St. Hubert ” to a modern engraver, who had never 
seen it nor any other of Albert Durer’s works. He 
looked at it for a minute contemptuously, then 
turned away : “ Ah, I see that man did not know 

much about aerial perspective ! ” All the glorious 
work and thought of the mighty master, all the re-* 
dundant landscape, the living vegetation, the mag¬ 
nificent truth of line, were dead letters to him, 
because he happened to have been taught one 
particular piece of knowledge which Durer despised. 
—Stones of Venice, III., p. 49. 

Young Folks in Picture Galleries.— It only 
wastes the time and dulls the feelings of young 
persons, to drag them through picture galleries; 
at least, unless they themselves wish to look at 
particular pictures. Generally, young people only 
care to enter a picture gallery when there is a 
chance of getting leave to run a race to the other 
end of it; and they had better do that in the gar¬ 
den below. If, however, they have any real enjoy¬ 
ment of pictures, and want to look at this one or 


308 


A RUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


that, the principal point is never to disturb them 
in looking at what interests them, and never to 
make them look at what does not. Nothing is of 
the least use to young people (nor, by the way, of 
much use to old ones), but what interests them; and 
therefore, though it is of great importance to put 
nothing but good art into their possession, yet when 
they are passing through great houses or galleries, 
they should be allowed to look precisely at what 
pleases them : if it is not useful to them as art, it 
will be in some other way : and the healthiest way 
in which art can interest them is when they look at 
it, not as art, but because it represents something 
they like in nature. If a boy has had his heart 
filled by the life of some great man, and goes up 
thirstily to a Vandyck portrait of him, to see what 
he was like, that is the wholesomest way in which 
he can begin the study of portraiture; if he love 
mountains, and dwell on a Turner draAving because 
he sees in it a likeness to a Yorkshire scar, or an 
Alpine pass, that is the wholesomest Avay in which 
he can begin the study of landscape; and if a girl’s 
mind is filled with dreams of angels and saints, and 
she pauses before an Angelico because she thinks 
it must surely be indeed like heaven, that is the 
Avholesomest Avay for her to begin the study of re¬ 
ligious art.— Elements of Drawing, pp. 185,186. 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—MUSEUMS. 


309 


CHAPTER III. 

Museums. 

A museum is, be it first observed, primarily, not 
at all a place of entertainment, but a place of 
Education. And a museum is, be it secondly ob¬ 
served, not a place for elementary education, but 
for that of already far-advanced scholars. And it 
is by no means the same thing as a parish school, 
or a Sunday school, or a day school, or even—the 
Brighton Aquarium.— Fors, III., p. 66. 

In all museums intended for popular teaching, 
there are two great evils to be avoided. The first 
is, superabundance; the second, disorder. The first 
is having too much of everything. You will find in 
your own work that the less you have to look at, the 
better you attend. You can no more see twenty 
things worth seeing in an hour, than you can read 
twenty books worth reading in a day. Give little, 
but that little good and beautiful, and explain it 
thoroughly.— Deucalion, p. 94. 

Nothing has so much retarded the advance of 
art as our miserable habit of mixing the works of 
every master and of every century. More would 
be learned by an ordinarily intelligent observer 
in simply passing from a room in which there were 
only Titians, to another in which there were only 
Caraccis, than by reading a volume of lectures on 
color. Few minds are strong enough first to ab¬ 
stract and then to generalize the characters of 
paintings hung at random. Few minds are so 
dull as not at once to perceive the points of differ¬ 
ence, were the works of each painter set by them¬ 
selves. The fatigue of which most persons com¬ 
plain in passing through a picture gallery, as at 
present arranged, is indeed partly caused by the 


310 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


straining effort to see what is out of sight, but not 
less by the continual change of temper and of tone 
of thought demanded in passing from the work of 
one master to that of another .—Arrows of the Chace, 
I-, P- 61. 

A museum, primarily, is to be for simple persons. 
Children, that is to say, and peasants. For your 
student, your antiquary, or your scientific gentle¬ 
man, there must be separate accommodation, or they 
must be sent elsewhere. . . . Secondly: The museum 
is to manifest to these simple persons the beauty 
and life of all things and creatures in their perfect¬ 
ness. Not their modes of corruption, disease, or 
death. Not even, always, their genesis, in the more 
or less blundering beginnings of it; not even their 
modes of nourishment, if destructive; you must not 
stuff a blackbird pulling up a worm, nor exhibit 
in a glass case a crocodile crunching a baby. 

Neither must you ever show bones or guts, or any 
other charnel-house stuff. Teach your children to 
know the lark’s note from the nightingale's; the 
length of their larynxes is their own business and 
God’s. 

It is difficult to get one clear idea into anybody, 
of any single thing. But next to impossible to get 
two clear ideas into them, of the same thing. We 
have had lion’s heads for door-knockers these hun¬ 
dred and fifty years, without ever learning so much 
as what a lion’s head is like. But with good mod¬ 
ern stuffing and sketching, I can manage now to 
make a child really understand something about 
the beast’s look, and his mane, and his sullen eyes 
and brindled lips. But if I’m bothered at the same 
time with a big bony box, that has neither mane, 
lips, nor eyes, and have to explain to the poor 
wretch of a parish schoolboy how somehow this 
fits on to that, I will be bound that, at a year’s 
end, draw one as big as the other, and he won’t 
know a lion’s head from a tiger’s—nor a lion’s 
skull from a rabbit’s. Nor is it the parish boy 
only who suffers. The scientific people themselves 


SOCIAL miLO SOPHY—MUSEUMS. 


311 


miss half their points from the habit of hacking at 
things, instead of looking at them. When I gave 
my lecture on the Swallow at Oxford, I challenged 
every anatomist there to tell me the use of his tail 
(I believe half of them didn’t know he had one). 
Not a soul of them could tell me, which I knew 
beforehand; but I did not know, till Iliad looked 
well through their books, how they were quarrel¬ 
ling about his wings ! Actually, at this moment 
(Easter Tuesday, 1880), I don’t believe you can find 
in any scientific book in Europe, a true account 
of the way a bird flies—or how a snake serpentines. 
My Swallow lecture was the first bit of clear state¬ 
ment on the one point, and when I get my Snake 
lecture published, you will have the first extant bit 
of clear statement on the other; and that is simply 
because the anatomists can’t, for their life, look at 
a thing till they have skinned it. 

In the British Museum, at the top of the stairs, 
we encounter in a terrific alliance a giraffe, a hip¬ 
popotamus, and a basking-shark. The public— 
young and old—pass with a start and a stare, and re¬ 
main as wise as they were before about all the three 
creatures. The day before yesterday I was standing 
by the big fish,—a father came up to it with his 
little boy. “That’s a shark,” says he; “ it turns 
on its side when it wants to eat you,” and so went 
on—literally as wise as he was before; for he had 
read in a book that sharks turn on their side to 
bite, and ho never looked at the ticket, which 
told him this particular shark only ate small fish. 
Now he never looked at the ticket because he didn’t 
expect to find anything on it except that this was 
the Sharkogobalus Smith-Jonesianius. But if, 
round the walls of the room, there had been all the 
well-known kinds of shark, going down in gradu¬ 
ated sizes, from that basking one to our waggling 
dog-fish, and if every one of these had had a plain 
English ticket, with ten words of common sense on 
it, saying where and how the beast lived, and a num¬ 
ber (unchangeable) referring to a properly arranged 
manual of the shark tribe (sold by the Museum 


312 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


publisher, Avho ought to have his little shop close 
by the porter’s lodge), both father and son must 
have been much below the level of the average Eng¬ 
lishman and boy in mother wit if they did not go out 
of the room by the door in front of them very dis¬ 
tinctly, and—to themselves—amazingly wiser than 
they had come in by the door behind them. 

If I venture to give instances of fault from the 
British Museum, it is because, on the whole, it is 
the best ordered and pleasantest institution in all 
England, and the grandest concentration of the 
means of human knowledge in the world. 

Every considerable town ought to have its ex¬ 
emplary collections of woodwork, ironwork, and 
jewellery attached to the schools of their several 
trades, leaving to be illustrated in its public mu¬ 
seum, as in an hexagonal bee’s cell, the six queenly 
and muse-tauglit arts of needlework, writing, pot¬ 
tery, sculpture, architecture, and painting. 

Eor each of these, there should be a separate 
Tribune or Chamber of absolute tribunal, which 
need not be large—that, so called, of Florence, not 
the size of a railway waiting-room, has actually for 
the last century determined the taste of the Euro¬ 
pean public in two arts !—in which the absolute best 
in each art, so far as attainable by the communal 
pocket, shall be authoritatively exhibited, with sim¬ 
ple statement that it is good, and reason why it is 
good, and notification in what particulars it is un¬ 
surpassable, together with some not too complex 
illustrations of the steps by which it has attained to 
that perfection, where these can be traced far back 
in history. 

These six Tribunes, or Temples of Fame, being 
first set, with their fixed criteria, there should fol¬ 
low a series of historical galleries, showing the rise 
and fall (if fallen) of the arts in their beautiful 
associations as practiced in the great cities and by 
the great nations of the world. The history of 
Egypt, of Persia, of Greece, of Italy, of France, and 
of England, should be given in their arts; dynasty 
by dynasty, age by age; and for the seventh, a 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—MUSEUMS. 


313 


Sunday Room, for the history of Christianity in its 
A -t, including the farthest range and feeblest efforts 
of it; reserving for this room also, what power 
co-ild be reached in delineation of the great mon¬ 
asteries and cathedrals which were once the glory 
of all Christian lands .—London Art Journal , Juno 
and Aug., 1880. 

[At his examination before the National Gallery 
Commission, in 1857, Mr. Ruskin said * that the 
Tribune at Florence was poorly arranged, the 
paintings and sculptures huddled together merely 
to show how many great and rich works could be 
got together in one place. But paintings and 
sculptures should be exhibited separately. lie gave 
it as his opinion that all kinds of pictures ought to 
be shown under glass, if possible; it gives them a 
greater delicacy, and keeps them from being ruined 
by coal smoke and dust.- Again, paintings should 
be hung on a line with the eye, and not so as to 
cover the walls of a room four or five deep. Ho 
would not accumulate in the gallery avast number 
of pictures, but a few of the characteristic ones of 
the greatest artists. Indeed, there should be two 
public galleries, one removed at a distance from 
London, and another, easily accessible to the people, 
designed for their education, and containing not the 
best and most precious works, but works true and 
right so far as they went. On some one enquiring 
his opinion of the value of second-rate art, he is re¬ 
ported to have said that fifth-rate, sixth-rate to a 
hundredth-rate art is good. Art that gives pleasure 
to any one has a right to exist. A child’s picture 
book pleases the baby; a flower beautifully drawn 
will delight a girl who is learning botany, and may 
be useful to some man of science. The true outline 
of a leaf shown to a child may turn the whole 
course of its life.f] 

* See The London Literary Gazette, Aug. 22,1857. 

t For further ideas of Ruskin on public Galleries of Art, seo 
Arrows of the Chace, I., pp. 47-65 and 101 107. 



314 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


CHAPTER IV. 

St. George’s Guild.* 

To the Workmen and Laborers of Great 
Britain. —Are there any landlords—any masters— 
who would like better to be served by men than by 
iron devils? Any tenants, any workmen, who can 
be true to their leaders and to each other ? who 
can vow to work and to live faithfully, for the sake 
of the joy of their homes ?—Will any such give the 
tenth of what they have, and of what they earn— 
not to emigrate with, but to stay in England with; 
and do what is in their hands and hearts to make 
her a happy England? I am not rich; (as people 
now estimate riches), and great part of what 1 have 
is already engaged in maintaining art-workmen, 
or for other objects more or less of public utility. 
The tenth of whatever is left to me, estimated as 
accurately as I can, (you shall see the accounts,) I 
will make over to you in perpetuity, with the best 
security that English law can give, on Christmas 
Day of this year, with engagement to add the 
tithe of whatever I earn afterwards. Who else will 
help, with little or much ? the object of such fund 
being, to begin, and gradually—no matter how 
slowly—to increase, the buying and securing of 

[* Sfc. George’s Guild was formally organized in 1871, and duly 
registered as a limited liabilities company. Ruskin at that 
time made over to it the tenth of his income, lie being worth 
about $550,000. Up to July, 1870, the membership numbered only 
about thirty persons, many of them young ladies. It curiously 
marks the unpopular nature of the enterprise, that the master, 
in drawing up for publication his list of names of members 
dared to give, at first, only the initials, and afterwards the first 
and last names of such as he thought would not blame him for 
so doing. Up to July, 1877, the Guild had funds in cash to the 
amount of £3,487 12s. Branch societies have been formed in 
Manchester, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. But Fors Claviycra , the 
official journal of the Guild, is no more issued, and the whole 
concern is reported to be moribund, if not dead. See the Intro¬ 
duction for further details.’ 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ST. GEORGE'S GUILD. 315 


land in England, which shall not be built upon, 
but cultivated by Englishmen, with their own 
hands, and such help of force as they can find in 
wind and wave. 

I do not care with how many, or how few, this 
thing is begun, nor on what inconsiderable scale— 
if it be but in two. or three poor men’s gardens. 
So much, at least, I can buy, myself and give them. 
If no help come, I have done and said what I could, 
and there will be an end. If any help come to me, 
it is to be on the following conditions:—We will 
try to make some small piece of English ground, 
beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no 
steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will 
have no untended or untliought-of creatures on it; 
none wretched, but the sick; none idle, but the 
dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant 
obedience to known law, and appointed persons; 
no equality upon it; but recognition of every bet- 
terness that we can find, and reprobation of every 
worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we 
will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles 
an hour in the risk of our lives; when we want to 
carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either 
on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, 
or boats; we will have plenty of flowers and vege¬ 
tables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in 
our fields,—and few bricks. We will have some 
music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance 
to it and sing it;—perhaps some of the old people, 
in time, may also. We will have some art, more¬ 
over; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, Ave 
can’t make some pots. The Greeks used to pain^ 
pictures of gods on their pots; we, probably, can¬ 
not do as much, but we may put some pictures of 
insects on them, and reptiles;—butterflies, and 
frogs, if nothing better. There was an excellent 
old potter in France who used to put frogs and 
vipers into his dishes, to the admiration of man¬ 
kind; we can surely put something nicer than that. 
Little by little, some higher art and imagination 
may manifest themselves among us; and feeble rays 


31G 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


of science may dawn for us. Botany, though too 
dull to dispute the existence of flowers; and history, 
though too simple to question the nativity of men; 
—nay—even perhaps an uncalculating and uncov- 
etous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting, at such 
nativity, gifts of gold and frankincense.— Fors, I., 
p. 73. 

Not an Experiment.— The very gist and essence 
of everything St. George orders is that it shall not 
be new, and not an “experiment”; but the re¬ 
declaration and re-doing of things known and 
practised successfully since Adam’s time. ... Is 
the earth new, and its bread ? Are the plow and 
sickle new in men’s hands ? Are Faith and God¬ 
liness new in their hearts ? Are common human 
charity and courage new ? By God’s grace, lasting 
yet, one sees in miners’ hearts and sailors’. Your po¬ 
litical cowardice is new, and your public rascality, 
and your blasphemy, and your equality, and your 
science of Dirt. New in their insolence and ram¬ 
pant infinitude of egotism—not new in one idea, or 
in one possibility of good.— Fors , IV., p. 45. 

An Ounce of Prevention.— To divert a little of 
the large current of English charity and justice 
from watching disease to guarding health, and from 
the punishment of crime to the reward of virtue; to 
establish, here and there, exercise grounds instead 
of hospitals, and training schools instead of peni- 
tiaries, is not, if you will slowly take it to heart, a 
frantic imagination.— Fors, I., p. 122. 

Contributions to the Fund of St. George.— 
First, let whoever gives us any, be clear in their 
minds that it is a Gift. It is not an Investment. It 
is a frank and simple gift to the British people; 
nothing of it is to come back to the giver. But also, 
nothing of it is to be lost. This money is not to be 
spent in feeding Woolwich infants with gunpowder. 
It is to be spent in dressing the earth and keeping 
it—in feeding human lips—in clothing human bod¬ 
ies—in kindling human souls. 

First of all, I say, in dressing the earth. As soon 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY — ST. GEORGE'S GUILD. 817 


as the fund reaches any sufficient amount, the 
Trustees shall buy with it any kind of land offered 
them at just price in Britain. Rock, moor, marsh, 
or sea-sliore—it matters not what, so it be British 
ground, and secured to us. 

Then, we will ascertain the absolute best that can 
be made of every acre. We will first examine what 
flowers and herbs it naturally bears; every whole¬ 
some flower that it will grow shall be sown in its 
wild places, and every kind of fruit-tree that can 
prosper; and arable and pasture land extended by 
every expedient of tillage, with humble and simple 
cottage dwellings under faultless sanitary regula¬ 
tion. Whatever piece of land we begin work upon, 
we shall treat thoroughly at once, putting unlimited 
manual labor on it, until we have every foot of it 
under as strict care as a flower garden: and the 
laborers shall be paid sufficient, unchanging wages; 
and their children educated compulsorily in agri¬ 
cultural schools inland, and naval schools by the 
sea; the indispensable first condition of such 
education being that boys learn either to ride or 
to sail; the girls to spin, weave, and sew, and at a 
proper age to cook all ordinary food exquisitely; 
the youths of both sexes to be disciplined daily in 
the strictest practice of vocal music; and for moral¬ 
ity, to be taught gentleness to all brute creatures— 
finished courtesy to each other—to speak truth with 
rigid care—and to obey orders with the precision of 
slaves. Then, as they get older, they are to learn 
the natural history of the place they live in—to 
know Latin, boys and girls both—and the history 
of five cities: Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and 
London.— Fors, I., pp. 109, 110. 

The Company of Mont Rose.— Within my St. 
George’s Company,—which shall be of persons still 
following their own business, wherever they are, 
but who will give the tenth of what they have, or 
make, for the purchase of land in England, to be 
cultivated by hand, as aforesaid in my last May 
number,—shall be another company, not distinc- 


318 


A BUSKIN ANTHOLOGY. 


tive, called of “ Monte Rosa,” or “ Mont Rose,” be¬ 
cause Monte Rosa is the central mountain of the 
range between north and south Europe, which 
keeps the gift of the rain of heaven. And the motto 
or watchword of this company is to be the old 
French “ Mont-joie.” And they are to be entirely 
devoted, according to their power, first to the man¬ 
ual labor of cultivating pure land, and guiding 
of pure streams and rain to the places where they 
are needed; and secondly, together with this manual 
labor, and much by its means, they are to carry on 
the thoughtful labor of true education, in them¬ 
selves and of others. And they are not to be monks 
nor nuns; but are to learn, and teach all fair 
arts, and sweet order and obedience of life; and to 
educate the children entrusted to their schools in 
such practical arts and patient obedience; but not 
at all, necessarily, in either arithmetic, writing, or 
reading.— Fors, I., p. 229. 

Creed op St. George’s Guild.— I. I trust in the 
Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven 
and earth, and of all things and creatures visible 
and invisible. 

I trust in the kindness of His law, and the good¬ 
ness of Ilis work. 

And I will strive to love Him, and keep His law, 
and see His work, while I live. 

II. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in 
the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of its mercy, 
and the joy of its love. 

And I will strive to love my neighbor as myself, 
and, even when I cannot, will act as if I did. 

III. I will labor, with such strength and oppor¬ 
tunity as God gives me, for my own daily bread; 
and all that my hand finds to do, I will do with my 
might. 

IV. I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, 
any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor 
hurt, or cause to be hurt, any human being for my 
gain or pleasure; nor rob, or cause to be robbed, 
any human being for my gain or pleasure. 

V. I will not kill nor hurt any living creature 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ST. GEORGES GUILD. 319 


needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will 
strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard 
and perfect all natural beauty, upon the earth. 

VI. I will strive to raise my own body and soul 
daily into higher powers of duty and happiness; 
not in rivalship or contention with others, but for 
the help, delight, and honor of others, and for the 
joy and peace of my own life. 

VII. I will obey all the laws of my country faith¬ 
fully; and the orders of its monarch, and of all 
persons appointed to be in authority under its 
monarch, so far as such laws or commands are 
consistent with what I suppose to be the law of 
God; and when they are not, or seem in anywise to 
need change, I will oppose them loyally and delib¬ 
erately, not with malicious, concealed, or disorderly 
violence. 

VIII. And with the same faithfulness, and under 
the limits of the same obedience which I render to 
the laws of my country, and the commands of its 
rulers, I will obey the laws of the Society called of St. 
George, into which I am this day received; and the 
orders of its masters, and of all persons appointed 
to be in authority under its masters, so long as I 
remain a Companion, called of St. George.— Fors, 
III., p. 40. 


IN RUSKIN’S UTOPIA. 

It would be part of my scheme of physical educa¬ 
tion that every youth in the State—from the King’s 
son downwards—should learn to do something 
finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let 
him know what touch meant; and what stout craft- 
manship meant; and to inform him of many things 
besides, which no man can learn but by some se¬ 
verely accurate discipline in doing .—Time and Tide, 
p. 91. 

In the case of great old families, which always 
ought to be, and in some measure, however deca¬ 
dent, still truly are, the noblest monumental archi- 



320 


A HUB KIN ANTHOLOGY. 


tecture of the kingdom, living temples of sacred 
tradition and hero’s religion, so much land ought 
to be granted to them in perpetuity as may enable 
them to live thereon with all circumstances of state 
and outward nobleness ,—Time and Tide, p. 100. 

All our actual and professed soldiers, whether 
professed for a time only, or for life, must be kept 
to hard work of hand, when not in actual war; 
their honor consisting in being sent to services of 
more pain and danger than others : to lifeboat ser¬ 
vice; to redeeming of ground from furious rivers 
or sea—or mountain ruin; to subduing wild and 
unhealthy land, and extending the confines of col¬ 
onies in the front of miasm and famine, and savage 
races .—Time and Tide, p. 119. 

Music.—In their first learning of notes, the young 
people shall be taught the great purpose of music, 
which is to say a thing that you mean deeply, in 
the strongest and clearest possible way; and they 
shall never be taught to sing what they don’t mean. 
They shall be able to sing merrily when they are 
happy, and earnestly when they are sad; but they 
shall find no mirth in mockery, nor in obscenity; 
neither shall they waste and profane their hearts 
with artificial and lascivious sorrow: Regulations 
which will bring about some curious changes in 
piano-playing, and several other things.— Fors, I., 

p. 122. 

Sumptuary Laws.— One of the most important 
conditions of a healthful system of social economy 
would be the restraint of the properties and in¬ 
comes of the upper classes within certain fixed 
limits. The temptation to use every energy in the 
accumulation of wealth being thus removed, an¬ 
other, and a higher ideal of the duties of advanced 
life would be necessarily created in the national 
mind; by withdrawal of those who had attained 
the prescribed limits of wealth from commercial com¬ 
petition, earlier worldly success, and earlier mar¬ 
riage, with all its beneficent moral results, would 
become possible to the young; while the older men 
of active intellect, whose sagacity is now lost or 


SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY—ST. GEORGE'S GUILD. 321 


warped in the furtherance of tlieir own meanest 
interests, would be induced unselfishly to occupy 
themselves in the superintendence of public insti¬ 
tutions, or furtherance of public advantage.— Time 
and Tide , p. 15. 

Tiie Professions in Utopia.—So far from want¬ 
ing any lawyers, of the kind that live by talking, 

I shall have the strongest possible objection to 
their appearance in the country. For doctors, I 
shall always entertain a profound respect; but 
when I get my athletic education established, of 
what help to them will my respect be ? They will 
all starve! And for clergymen, it is true, I shall 
have a large number of episcopates—one over every 
hundred families—(and many positions of civil au¬ 
thority also, for civil officers, above them and 
below), but all these places will involve much hard 
work, and be anything but covetable; while, of 
clergymen’s usual work—admonition, theological 
demonstration, and the like—I shall want very little 
done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for 
I will allow no man to admonish anybody, until 
he has previously earned his own dinner by more 
productive work than admonition.— Time and Tide, 
p. 73. 

Co-operative Trade Guilds.—I use the word 
co-operation, as opposed, not to masterliood, but 
to competition. I do not mean, for instance, by co¬ 
operation, that all the master-bakers in a town are 
to give a share of their profits to the men who go 
out with the bread; but that the masters are not to 
try to undersell each other, nor seek each to get 
the other’s business, but are all to form one society, 
selling to the public under a common law of severe 
penalty for unjust dealing, and at an established 
price. 1 do not mean that all bankers’ clerks 
should be partners in the bank; but I do mean 
that all bankers should be members of a great 
national body, answerable as a society for all de¬ 
posits; and that the private business of speculating 
with other people’s money should take another 
name than that of “ banking.” And, for final in- 


A HUSKIN' ANTHOLOGY. 


322 

stance, I mean by “ co-operation ” not only fellow¬ 
ships between trading firms, but between trading 
nations; so that it shall no more be thought (as it 
is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an ad¬ 
vantage for one nation to undersell another, and 
take its occupation away from it; but that the 
primal and eternal law of vital commerce shall be 
of all men understood—namely, that every nation 
is fitted by its character, and the nature of its terri¬ 
tories, for some particular employments or manu¬ 
factures; and that it is the true interest of every 
other nation to encourage it in such specialty, and 
by no means to interfere with, but in all ways for¬ 
ward and protect its efforts, ceasing all rivalship 
with it, so soon as it is strong enough to occupy its 
proper place .—Time and Tide , p. 11. 

The chief difficulty in the matter would be to fix 
your standard. This would have to be done by the 
guild of every trade in its own manner, and within 
certain easily recognizable limits; and this fixing 
of standard would necessitate much simplicity in 
the forms and kinds of articles sold. You could 
only warrant a certain kind of glazing or painting 
in china, a certain quality of leather or cloth, 
bricks of a certain clay, loaves of a defined mixture 
of meal. Advisable improvements or varieties in 
manufacture would have to be examined and ac¬ 
cepted by the trade guild: when so accepted, they 
would be announced in public reports; and all 
puffery and self-proclamation, on the part of trades¬ 
men, absolutely forbidden, as much as the making 
of any other kind of noise or disturbance. 

But observe, this law is only to have force over 
tradesmen whom 1 suppose to have joined volun¬ 
tarily in carrying out a better system of commerce. 
Outside of their guild, they would have to leave 
the rogue to puff and cheat as he chose, and the 
public to be gulled as they chose. All that is neces¬ 
sary is that the said public should clearly know 
the shops in which they could get warranted arti¬ 
cles; and, as clearly, those in which they bought 
at their own risk .—Time and Tide, pp. 57-59. 


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